Essential lessons from an unpromising source: what reformers can learn from the Philippines on corruption control

Abstract

Purpose

Corruption control in the Republic of the Philippines (RP) has hardly failed, but it is not (yet) a success story either. Dramatic “people power” episodes have occurred, but populism has also, at times, led to repression. Still, essential reform lessons are available.

Design/methodology/approach

This is a conceptual reassessment of corruption control. Central concerns include the types of corruption experienced in the country, incentives that might sustain collective action, the need to measure both corruption and reform, and linking reform to citizens’ quality of life.

Findings

Top-down, whole-country approaches to reform often treat corruption as if it were the same everywhere, thereby emphasizing “best practices”. However, that can be misleading: a best practice in one society might be irrelevant, impossible, or harmful in another. Contemporary reformers must carefully examine the historical, social, economic, and political contexts, as well as the consequences of corruption. Groups and activities seemingly unrelated to corruption control can prove essential. Reformers must fight corruption with people, not for them.

Originality/value

The ultimate goal of reform must be justice: redressing imbalances of power while building social and political trust.

Citation

Johnston, M. (2024), "Essential lessons from an unpromising source: what reformers can learn from the Philippines on corruption control", Public Administration and Policy: An Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 27 No. 3, pp. 344-356. https://doi.org/10.1108/PAP-04-2024-0066

The continuing struggle

Few countries have suffered as much from corruption as the Republic of the Philippines (hereafter, “RP”) (Quah, 2021; Quah, 2020; Batalla, 2020). Few have seen anti-corruption efforts as numerous, prolonged, and dramatic – consider the massive street demonstrations that helped oust Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 and Joseph “Erap” Estrada in 2001. At the same time, few have witnessed the sorts of abuses in the name of anti-corruption and drug control that the RP experienced under the administration of Rodrigo Duterte (Arugay and Baquisal, 2023). The harm done by corruption to so many citizens, to the national and regional economies, and to the RP’s international standing make it difficult to claim significant and lasting reform progress. What can we learn from those experiences?

By all rights the RP should be an economic and political powerhouse. Its population of 114 million, scattered across 7,700 islands, is young and possesses formidable social energy. Most speak English with some degree of proficiency – an asset in the world economy. For better and worse, the nation has received extensive development aid and good-governance assistance. Again for better and worse, its links to the United States and other market democracies remain strong. In the mid-1960s a casual observer, challenged to place economic bets upon South Korea or the RP, might well have chosen the latter.

But the country continues to struggle economically, with corruption and perceptions of corruption being important causes. GDP per capita has increased more than threefold since the year 2000, yet the RP remains a lower-middle income country (The World Bank, 2023). Inequalities among and within localities can be significant. The well-known Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index (TI-CPI), while not a measure of corruption as such, is closely-watched in the RP; its changes – from 33 points out of 100 in 2022, ranking 116^th out of 180 countries, to 34 and 115^th in 2023 (Transparency International, 2023) – are if anything over-analyzed (Politiko, 2024a; Politiko, 2024b) for what they might show. Overall, the TI figures outline a corruption situation that is not perceived as changing markedly in at least a generation.

An indifferent track record for reform, however, is far from unique to the RP. The international anti-corruption industry, while far larger and better-resourced than a generation ago, has few whole-country reform stories to tell. Claims of success at local levels and in specific institutions appear frequently, but their lasting impact and the extent to which they travel well to other places are unclear. Compared to the anti-corruption industry’s self-image the RP’s record, both despite and because of its uneven nature, may hold more valuable lessons for reformers.

Given the sheer diversity of the RP’s experiences with corruption, and of its responses over the years, the discussion to come will not apply equally to all reform efforts in the country – much less to those of its neighbors in the region. But I suggest that we can learn more from the sorts of mixed-to-negative outcomes that arise in most reform experiences, particularly as they highlight variables and dilemmas we need to anticipate, than by cherry-picking “best practices” that may reflect favorable circumstances unlikely to be found elsewhere. At the very least, the challenges and risks of reform in the RP, and any opportunities for better practices, are what the country’s “essential lessons” are all about.

Lessons from the Philippines

It would be inaccurate to claim that the RP has failed outright in checking corruption, if only because it is impossible to say what the present would be like if reforms had not been tried. Moreover, corruption is not a unified national trait, even at the level of perceptions, but rather can vary markedly among levels of society and government, sectors of policy and the economy, and type of community. After all, we lack a consensual definition of corruption, and our numerical indices are proxies at best for exceedingly complex realities. Lessons from the RP will not add up to a new corruption-control cookbook. They may, however, help us replace tired concepts and empty language (Johnston, 2023) with fresh approaches and adjust our views regarding the myriad social connections and institutional niches where corruption can take root.

Think big – and think small

One way to begin is to look beyond the notion of corruption as a problem of law enforcement and punishment, and to view it instead as a symptom of power imbalances enabling the few to abuse the many (Johnston and Fritzen, 2021). In that connection we should take seriously the notion of the RP as a “flawed democracy” (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2024) – a rating it shares with the United States – and Freedom House’s classification of the nation as only “partly free” (Freedom House, 2024). The question then becomes how and why powerful figures in both the public and private sectors can act with so few constraints, and how citizens respond or adapt to the power situations in which they and their communities are immersed. Teehankee and Calimbahin (2020), for example, highlight the incoherence and ineffectiveness of democratic institutions in the face of longstanding oligarchical and family-based power, clientelism, and systems of obligation.

Those power relationships normally serve the interests of deeply entrenched elites and can be stronger and more durable than formal democratic frameworks. They are unlikely to be dislodged by short-lived, externally funded “good governance” projects, by sporadic legal crackdowns on individual or small-group miscreants, or by an exclusive focus upon improving administrative processes, worthy as that goal is in itself. No more, unfortunately, will fundamental imbalances of power melt away in the face of short-lived episodes of “people power”. Those upheavals do at least point to the scope and depth of change that real reform requires, but sustaining popular pressure for justice is a continuing challenge. None of this is to suggest that law enforcement or mass mobilizations are unimportant – far from it. But enacting and enforcing sound laws, updating penalties, and fully funding the Sandiganbayan and other anti-corruption institutions are likely to encounter entrenched elite resistance so long as underlying imbalances of power remain in place.

Reform is stressful

Nearly everyone likes “reform” – so much so, in fact, that the word is often used to make unpopular ideas more politically palatable. In the United States, for example, cutbacks on Social Security benefits and legislation making it more difficult for citizens to seek damages from large corporations have both been termed “reforms”. Reform can be a powerful appeal. but not everything called a reform is necessarily a good idea, and not all such proposals will necessarily lead to less, or to less harmful, corruption.

Those are familiar notions. Less so is the fact that in a “fragile state” (Bondoc, 2024) reforms, and the political push on which they depend, can place immense stress upon institutions, elite alignments, and citizens’ connections with leaders and each other. Indeed, if reform is to be effective it could hardly not be stressful, as it will entail challenging entrenched interests and disrupting the ways elites influence or neutralize citizen preferences. Difficult as the corrupt status quo might be, many citizens improvise coping strategies – at times, corrupt – that ease some challenges of day-to-day life. New controls might thus make things worse for society’s have-nots for some time before any benefits become apparent. Those sorts of concerns could be critical in a society like the RP with its extensive poverty.

What are the specific lessons of such stresses for reformers? One is that attempts at significant change must be backed up by sound social, institutional, and financial support – often, requiring precisely the sorts of assets that have been misappropriated by corrupt figures. The credibility of reform ideas, and their connections to the quality of everyday life, are also critical: citizens must be able to believe they stand to benefit from anti-corruption efforts, and that those changes have a chance to last. Corrupt institutions and the bad old ways of doing things must be replaced by something better, lest corrupt networks reassert themselves and misplaced nostalgia set in among citizens. Citizens and businesses must be offered incentives (Johnston and Kpundeh, 2004) other than public purposes: “better government for all” is a noble idea but vulnerable to collective action problems and “reform fatigue.”. Finally, corruption control will never “arrive” at some finish line beyond which society somehow reverts to a happy equilibrium. Ousted interests will not give up their privileges gladly, and new opportunities for corruption can develop faster than our ability to recognize and respond to them.

History matters

Reform never takes place on a clean slate. The effects of past events and the incentives, relationships, and expectations shaping contemporary corruption can become deeply embedded in a society. In the former instance, for example, You (2015) has shown that agrarian land reform, generally successful in post-war South Korea but blocked in the RP for ideological reasons by the United States, significantly influenced Korean and Filipino experiences of corruption. More generally, Lorenzana (2024) sees the prevalence of “dysfunctional” American-style conceptions of politics as a major reason why reform momentum growing out of the ouster of Ferdinand Marcos dissipated as quickly as it did. Insistence that the Cory Aquino government seek an electoral mandate little more than a year after Marcos fell left a fledgling government with only shallow social roots facing entrenched family networks throughout the country. To that we might add Fukuyama’s (2013) argument that American conceptions of governance often overemphasize checking and dividing power, rather than enabling its effective use.

History matters in more general ways too. Attempts to produce systemic change must take longstanding social values into account: local systems of status and obligation cannot be arbitrarily swept away. Indeed, attempts to do so can be stymied by the ways people understand leadership, cooperation, and trust in their own communities. Davis et al. (2024) show the enduring power of the RP’s dynastic families as reflected in data on public procurement, finding that dynastic dominance in a province undermines formal checks and balances and is associated with heightened risks of corruption and poor governance (Jimenez, 2024), Similarly, Thompson (2020) comparing Thailand and the RP argues that even after six years of reform effort by the Noy Aquino administration, local power relations and in-group loyalties still helped usher in Duterte’s illiberal and violent presidency.

At least three further implications of these dynamics are worth noting. One is that while corruption is a critical problem as analysts and reformers view it, it is not always the most important issue for citizens. Poverty, hunger, illness, social division, and injustices may well be linked to corruption and exacerbated by it, but for desperate communities appeals to “good governance” or “public integrity” may seem to miss the point. Indeed, citizen expectations that corrupt elites can be sources of help (even if erroneous) can undercut such appeals. Reformers may need to present a track record of fighting poverty and delivering benefits before they can take on corruption as a public issue.

Second, language and metaphors matter too: describing corruption as a disease or form of deviance that has destroyed some preferable past situation can distract us from the many ways in which it may be deeply embedded in social relationships, institutions, and economies. For many citizens those factors may not appear to be problems to be solved, but rather to be facts of life with uses and significance of their own (for vote-buying, Canare et al., 2018; Schaffer, 2005), This is not to say that such corruption is beneficial in any sense, but rather that reformers’ worldviews will not always appeal to everyone. Seeking to end corruption without putting new and usable arrangements in its place is likely to prove futile.

Third, just as history matters it can also vary in a multitude of ways between, and within, societies. A “best practice” in Country A may, for longstanding reasons, be impossible, irrelevant, or downright harmful elsewhere. Moreover, today’s circumstances that make a case seem ripe for some best practice can distract us from deeper, but critical, historical contrasts. It is commonly observed that “one size fits all” reforms are a bad idea, but history can reveal key reasons why that is true.

Reform requires trust

If we think of corruption control as more than making and enforcing rules, the importance of trust becomes apparent. Accountability and compliance – as opposed to sheer coercion – cannot be sustained without workable levels of trust. In a democracy trust, both in government and among citizens, is most sustainable when it is pragmatic and conditional (Lane, 1962), rather than taking the form of blind faith.

Corruption undermines trust in institutions, officials, and fellow citizens, but in reciprocal ways; indeed, levels of trust may be a stronger influence upon perceptions of officials’ performance and character (Xiao et al., 2024). Further, trust is needed in order to overcome the alienation, resignation and sense of injustice that can result from abuses of power but also to implement reforms that have a chance to succeed (those connections are explored in Dincer and Johnston, 2025), Persson et al. (2013) argue that corruption control requires effective, sustained collective action; that, in turn, is more difficult where citizens do not trust each other (Rothstein and Uslaner, 2005). Merchants asked to join a no-bribes pledge are less likely to stand by such commitments if they do not trust each other to honor their pledges; citizens asked to forego corrupt officials’ petty benefits need to trust reformers’ claims that doing so will bring benefits.

When it comes to trust, the RP faces an uphill climb. While communal ties can be deep and lasting, some social linkages may be patron-client relationships with officials or local potentates – what Springborg (1979, p. 261) calls “lopsided friendships” – solidifying elite control more than helping most citizens. In-group trust, in turn, does not necessarily extend to broader segments of society.

Among the survey items frequently used to assess countries’ levels of social trust are those asking (in various ways) whether respondents think “most people can be trusted”, or that “you need to be very careful” (a history of such questions and important caveats appear in Reeskens, 2013; for a defense see Uslaner, 2015). Such questions leave much to be desired: many might say that both statements are true simultaneously. In any event that sort of question has been used for a long time mostly because it has been used for a long time, and thus offers an extensive comparative baseline. Still, World Values Survey data from 2019 suggest that compared to twenty-three other countries, the RP suffers from a trust deficit: Norwegians were most likely to say that most people can be trusted (72 percent), followed by respondents in China (64 percent) and Sweden (63 percent). Australia came fourth at 49 percent, the United States ninth (37 percent), and South Korea eleventh (33 percent). The RP, by contrast, tied with Indonesia at the bottom with only five percent saying most people can be trusted (Policy Institute, 2023). Similar data from 2022 estimated trust in the RP at 5.3 percent (Our World in Data, 2023). Whatever reservations one might have regarding such findings, low levels of trust seem an important reason why corruption control in the RP has been an uphill climb.

Reformers are thus confronted with a paradox: higher quality government might help build social trust, but a lack of trust makes reform more difficult. There are ways out of that dilemma: Ostrom (1998) offers classic propositions about building collective action on foundations of reciprocity, reputation, and trust. Rothstein (2011) argues that universalistic policies to which all citizens contribute, and from which all stand to benefit in reliable ways, can also build trust. Uslaner (2017) presents intriguing findings that the quality and accessibility of a country’s public education in 1870 remains a robust predictor of apparent levels of corruption today – a result that might reflect not only the extended benefits of education, but also of equitable and dependable delivery of public services. In any event, selecting corruption controls out of an international reform playbook without careful regard to the RP’s social values is likely to waste resources and scarce reform opportunities.

All corruption is not alike

For many reasons – the ease of plugging whole-country scores on one-dimensional corruption indices into equations, a tendency to conceive of corruption simply as bribery, or the temptation to understand its causes and effects solely in terms of development – we often tend to overlook the ways in which corruption qualitatively changes across space and time. Some varieties are closely linked to violence while others may create alternatives to it. Sometimes corruption enables elites to build mass followings while elsewhere it facilitates authoritarianism, and in other cases corruption makes it unclear whether anyone can govern at all. Most corruption occurs at the expense of sustained economic growth, but other kinds can foster de facto predictability that investors find attractive (on these and other contrasts see Johnston, 2014). Many varieties are clearly illegal; others occur within, or even with the protection of, laws and legitimate institutions (Lessig, 2013; Thompson, 2018).

There is no authoritative typology of forms of corruption. Some listings focus only on techniques (e.g., bribery vs. extortion) without digging into deeper historical, social, institutional, and economic contrasts. Adding to the problem is the tendency to treat corruption as a whole-country attribute rather than emphasizing internal contrasts (comparisons among the American states appear in Dincer and Johnston, 2025). My attempt at a comparative framework (Johnston, 2014) proposes four contrasting “syndromes of corruption”: Influence Markets (strong institutions, open and competitive markets and politics); Elite Cartels (only moderately strong institutions, with markets and politics dominated by elite alliances solidified by corrupt collusion, often in regimes that are reforming after periods of authoritarian rule or violence); Oligarchs and Clans (very weak institutions and rapidly expanding political and economic opportunities contended over – at times, violently – by a variety of “strongmen” and their personal followings); and Official Moguls (very weak official institutions with wealth and power dominated by a dictator, junta, or family). Weak institutions and extensive corruption may make Oligarchs and Clans seem similar to Official Moguls. But while in the latter there is little doubt who holds power, the Oligarchs and Clans category emphasizes intense contention among leaders and their factions over wealth and power.

The RP lands in the Oligarchs and Clans category, with many of the “clans” being literal families. That syndrome is also notable for the ways it can disrupt civil society, economies, and politics as violence and contention among Oligarchs create, and feed upon, profound insecurity. In such settings, investors are likely to seek quick returns and to keep their assets as mobile as possible – or simply invest elsewhere – while citizens may find it prudent to keep their heads down.

In no way is this typology definitive. More attention is needed to the ways contrasting syndromes coexist in a society – particularly one as large and complex as the RP (although because of the contrasting institutional, political, and economic conditions that define them, syndromes are unlikely to “blend”). Just as Filipino corruption is not merely the same problem that Denmark or Cameroon experience, varying only by amount, contrasts between, say, Maguindanao and Metro Manila need further analysis. The value of any such scheme, however, lies in the way it might help us understand the origins and impact of corruption in a given time and place and, therefore, what can be done to deal with it. A sound typology will never lead to simple reforms, but it may help us avoid serious mistakes: for example, western efforts to promote privatization in post-1991 Russia arguably poured petrol on a corruption fire. As for the RP, Oligarchs-and-Clans corruption dominated by powerful families means that direct challenges to entrenched interests will encounter powerful opposition – and could place citizens at significant risk. It would be better, in this view, to work over time to create safe and valued political and economic space beyond the control of those oligarchs, and to encourage the emergence of citizen voices pursuing a range of demands – not just corruption – advocating their own lasting interests. Another priority might be to develop locally focused, yet widely accessible, indicators and benchmarks of government performance relating to citizens’ grievances. Such evidence could help identify corruption hot spots, demonstrate and reward effective leadership, and show would-be bad actors that the rewards of corruption are being reduced in specific areas and sectors.

Be careful what you wish for

“People power” and “political will” are popular concepts among reformers, and both have their attractions. As for “People power”, massive public demonstrations are dramatic and sometimes can sweep aside old corrupt regimes (Beyerle, 2014): the 1986 EDSA I demonstrations that ousted Ferdinand Marcos, for example, inspired people around the world. Where such action can be channeled into prolonged civil resistance it can exert significant force for accountability (Chenoweth, 2014; Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). But if the idea is that corruption can be checked in sustained ways by ousting abusive leaders from time to time, the prospects are not favorable.

Massive people power events are difficult to sustain in part because of the demands they place upon citizens, institutions, and the locales in which they occur. Moreover, they can place citizens at great risk: the anti-Marcos demonstrations could well have culminated in a slaughter. Incentives and interests perpetuating corrupt dealings may be embedded in power structures and can reassert themselves with a vengeance. Too often, “people power” energy is unfocused, short-lived – particularly after top figures are deposed – and vulnerable to collective action problems.

Calls for “political will” (Buendia, 2022; Senate of the Philippines, 2006) are a popular staple of reform discussions, and well-conceived reforms may well benefit from top-level backing. But sound corruption controls and imposing a leader’s will upon complex and changing situations can be very different things. Political will can protect corruption and abuses of power – indeed, has often been used that way. Calls for “political will” can amount to little more than an empty slogan – a hope that someone will come along to make reform ideas work, regardless of their quality. When reform fails it is easy – and, for reformers, can be self-serving – to claim that proposed controls were sound, but leaders just lacked sufficient political will. But “will”, after all, is a matter of intentions and dispositions, unknowable other than by what we see as its effects. As Brinkerhoff (2000) rightly argues, we can only assess the strength of political will post hoc and in its full context. Indeed, arguments from political will can become an exercise in blaming the victims of corruption because of their supposedly insufficient backing for reform (Johnston, 2018). Worse yet, in any democratic or democratizing society reducing corruption control to “political will” distracts us from a critical question confronting citizens: how best to demand, encourage, and sustain official support for effective reform. Perhaps the most important political will is generated from the grassroots upward.

Both issues bear considerable relevance to the RP, not just via historical events but because they point to important anti-corruption risks. Popular anger can back reformers, but it can also be mobilized by demagogues to amass personal power and punish opponents. Rodrigo Duterte, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, and Donald J. Trump had no shortage of political will – and both Trump and Bolsonaro showed they could mobilize “people power” in the streets on their own. Duterte made great political capital out of pledges to fight corruption, drugs, and crime, and to remedy the shortcomings of democracy. While he failed on all counts, he still accumulated formidable personal power and inflicted violence upon poor communities (de Jesus, 2021). Garrido (2022, p. 673) suggests that “repeated failures to reform democracy have resulted in … increasing openness to certain authoritarian forms of government” in the RP, and that “[t]hese attitudes manifest on the ground as calls for ‘disciplining’ democracy” (Teehankee, 2022; Bautista, 2020). Reform advocates should call for “political will” only with caution, if at all, keeping its risks front and center while refraining from using it to obscure the weaknesses of poorly devised controls.

The grievances fueling the rise of Duterte, Bolsonaro, and Trump are no less significant for having been distorted, manipulated, and misdirected to support those leaders’ personal agendas. I emphatically do not suggest, thereby, that such leaders had the best interests of their followers at heart. But large numbers of people around the world – many of them in established democracies – feel left out when important decisions affecting their lives are being made. Indeed, Warren (2004) argues that such “duplicitous exclusion” is the essence of corruption in a democracy. In some cases, the exclusion comes because of bribery, collusion, and outright lawbreaking. But in others, as witness the discussion of institutional corruption above, the activities involved are fully legal – indeed, constitutionally protected in some countries. Many citizens of those societies believe their fundamental rights have been taken away, and they are angry. Demagogues and pseudo-populists, possessed of little policy insight but endowed with strong political will – are adept at capitalizing upon that anger.

But opponents of corruption have been fighting the same kinds of collusion, unfair advantages, and duplicitous exclusion for a long time, and must reclaim the issues that gave rise to the anti-corruption movement in the first place (Johnston, 2020), They must do so not only to fight corruption more effectively, but also to prevent demagogues and anti-system movements from undermining the democratic processes upon which lasting reform depends (della Porta and Portos, 2024).

What do we do now?

There are numerous general principles and ideas reformers can learn by examining the RP case. But how might we apply them? What follows is derived from a discussion developed in 2010 – in many ways a less-fraught time in the nation’s politics (Johnston, 2012). These ideas do not apply solely to the RP, nor are they derived from a broad critique of “Asian values” (Wirawan, 2023). Rather, they are aimed at two challenges confronting reformers everywhere: addressing imbalances of power and building sustained popular demand for reform. They will, for that reason, not necessarily seem new to reformers. But they do emphasize political accountability and sustained reductions in poverty – in effect, enhancing citizens’ ability and opportunities to defend their interests and wellbeing by political means (Johnston, 2014).

Here are three basic principles, a set of shorter-term priorities, and some long-term chances too: Reform should aim for fundamental changes in relationships between government and society at the grassroots. This does not mean that the national democratic framework should be ignored: it is, after all, the oldest in Southeast Asia (Teehankee and Calimbahin, 2020). But in important respects it continues to rest atop political alignments shaped by longstanding family machines and interests. Leaders need to be able to win authority and govern through democratic institutions, rather than by negotiating the shifting and uncertain links between government and the old elite networks. There is no easy way to produce such changes; longstanding ways of doing things cannot, and should not, be abruptly swept away, for confronting them in hasty fashion might well invite repression. But they should instead face strong competition from, and in time be supplanted by, political linkages and accountability based on citizen services, accountability, employing the indicators and benchmarks proposed above.

It is time to rethink what we mean by “civil society”. Civil Society in the RP, broadly speaking, has immense potential strength. Reformers, however, have too often envisioned civil society primarily as formal, dedicated organizations depended upon support from above and without and, therefore, vulnerable to cooptation and collective action problems. A better approach might be to make common cause with, and build upon, existing social networks people use to cope with life’s challenges, even when those groups do not have explicit anti-corruption goals. Social capital can be versatile and diverse in form; improving local utility services, schools, or policing – causes that likely enjoy popular support and thus may be less vulnerable to collective action problems – could produce anti-corruption benefits too, Moreover, they could win support from local and regional elites by creating opportunities to claim credit for improvements in the quality of life.

A final suggestion is to develop better metrics for assessing corruption, the quality of government performance, justice, and the impact of reforms. Lin and Yu (2014) have shown that in thirteen East and Southeast Asian societies the perceptions shaping international policy and indices can differ significantly from corruption as people experience it. Whole-country index scores can hide simultaneous deterioration and improvements. Worse yet, they give little indication as to where to attack, what to do, and what effects, if any, we might have. The indicators-and-benchmarks approach is no solution to all those difficulties, but it might tie both corruption and reform more closely to credible evidence of the quality of life. Local elites and citizen networks can tell us a great deal about corruption as people experience it, and an indicators-and-benchmarks system incorporating local networks and leadership can make it clear where and when, reform is needed – and what makes it real for citizens. Some short-term recommendations are made as follows:

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  Relentlessly frame corruption control in terms of fighting poverty and improving citizens’ quality of life; build trust through the effective provision of services and facilities (e.g., schools, public utilities, policing, taxation) in which large parts of the population share an interest.

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  Consolidate anti-corruption responsibilities that have historically been scattered among several offices and agencies. A consolidated anti-corruption office possessing sufficient staffing and resources should also have arrest and subpoena powers and prosecute cases on its own authority.

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  Recruit an Eminent Persons Group from many segments of society to advise on and oversee evaluation of reforms, report to the public, and evaluate the consolidated anti-corruption agency.

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  Speed up the Sandiganbayan by providing full staffing and resources. Cases placed on the docket should move ahead in an expeditious manner.

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  Establish a Citizen Advocate within each Cabinet-level public service department to serve as a focus for citizens’ and civil society groups’ service and corruption concerns.

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  Publicly cite and reward officials responsible for improved performance on benchmarks; require unsuccessful officials to account for results.

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  Allocate resources to reward agencies and jurisdictions showing improvement on benchmarks.

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  Support reform-minded bureaucrats with bonuses, recognition, whistleblower protections, and promotions. When corrupt officials are dismissed, roll their salaries over into higher pay for those who remain.

Over the longer term, some suggestions are made as follows:

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  Launch, sustain, and refine an anti-corruption curriculum in the schools.

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  Elect Senators by districts (an action requiring constitutional amendment).

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  Enhance the professionalism, political independence, and credibility of the judiciary, emphasizing protection of human rights and property rights.

Few if any of these proposals are wholly new ideas, and some have at times been given a reform push. None will be “silver bullet” remedies; the legacies of the Duterte era, and continuing challenges ranging from poverty to the influence of powerful families mean that the time will never be entirely right for reform, and violent populism will remain a very real risk. Instead, these ideas are intended to illustrate how the RP’s experiences can point to broader anti-corruption efforts in which the strongest anti-corruption force in society will be the Filipino people themselves.

Conclusion

I make no claim to have touched upon all corruption problems or reform initiatives in the RP. The argument, instead, is that an international reform movement that produces numerous glossy reports and websites, yet has few major success stories to recount, can benefit from looking at a tough case – one where smart, hard-working, and courageous people have taken steps forward but also suffered reverses. That is the real world in which corruption control must find a way forward. To do so the international reform industry must become more political and less self-protective (Johnston and Johnsøn, 2014) and fight corruption with people rather than for them. That, together with the energy and resources that have bolstered the cause of reform in the years since the end of the Cold War, may enable corruption fighters in the RP to tell the world some very different stories in the future.