Social development, infrastructure, and connectivity issues

In terms of population density, Bohol ranks medium among Philippine provinces in 2000 (see figure 6.18). Intra-provincially, Tagbilaran City lists, as expected, the highest population density in 1995 (figure 7.12).

The municipalities around the city, those facing Cebu, Panglao, Jagna and some municipalities in the far East as well as Bien Unido in the North also record higher densities, Bohol is at an annual average of 2.9 %, and thus higher than the national rate (compare also figure 6.19). Bohol’s population has numerically multiplied fivefold since 1903. Given this

rapid population growth the mentioned low official rate of unemployment strikes me and suggests that the higher self-rated counterpart provided by the Bohol Poll is more realistic (confirmed by expert interviews 5 and 20). Boholanos engage in out-migration specifically to Mindanao and Metro Manila (Ulrich & Edgecombe 1999).

Figure 7.12: Population density 1995

Table 7.4: Fastest growing municipalities in Bohol 1995-2000

Education and health

Figure 6.21 illustrates that (a) about 5% of Boholanos aged five or older have no education, (b) over 50% have accomplished primary education, (c) approximately 25% secondary, and (d) about 20% tertiary levels. In comparison to other provinces, Bohol ranks in (a) medium, (b) highest, (c) medium to low, and (d) high quartiles respectively. Strikingly, the province registers more tertiary attainments than Cebu although official sources locate eight universities in Cebu and only one in Bohol (compare chapter 6.22; STEDNET 2002). The educational data situation becomes even more confusing when considering the vector-based educational infrastructure of Bohol displayed in figure 7.13 (as compiled by the PPDO 2004), where seven universities are recorded for Bohol. During my field visits and interviews I heard of only two universities, both located in Tagbilaran City. I also learnt that only the (secondary) educational facilities in Tagbilaran and Ubay offer education and qualification, which enable their students to gain access to higher-level careers. Overall, again major limitation to research due to low data quality become apparent. In this context, I am unable to provide a reliable assessment of educational facilities in Bohol, let alone their spatial distribution.

According to figure 6.22 Boholanos are included in the quartile of Filipinos with the highest life expectancy and register – in comparison with other provinces – a great lack of doctors. In addition, figure 7.13 shows that most hospitals are located along the coast, reaching up to Inabanga in the West and Anda in the East, whereas the North and interior municipalities are scarcely served. Private hospitals allocate particularly to areas between Tagbilaran and Guindulman or Tagbilaran and Tubignon. People from outer islands and often those from the uplands usually have to travel to ‘mainland’ Bohol for education and health services. Thus, they have to spend their scarce financial resources for transport to obtain (public) social services (field visits 4, 5, 11).

Figure 7.13: Educational and health infrastructure in Bohol as of 2001

Water scarcity

Figure 7.14 adds another aspect of health infrastructure: It visualises the percentage of households with access to doubtful water resources. The respective inter-provincial map in figure 6.23 registers 30.8% of Boholanos with no access to safe water in 2000, sorting it into the second highest quartile of

provinces. Figure 7.14 now illuminates that particularly in the poor North, in some municipalities up to 70% of households, lack safe water access, with gradually decreasing percentages towards the (wealthier) South. Noteworthy, lowland areas are generally more adversely affected than uplands (with the exception of Carmen), because various rivers well in the mountains and usually flow towards the South of the island (PPDO 2002; compare accounts on agricultural water supply). The municipality of Cortes, adjacent

to Tagbilaran, records rather poor access to safe water due to economically profitable yet environmentally controversial aquaculture and nipa production in its main river (nipa is a part of mangroves used for roofing) (field visit 5).

Altogether, these findings strike even more when considering that according to the PPDO (2002), even in the well-developed Panglao the majority of the tourism resorts face continuous scarcity of drinking water. Such statement suggests that the situation for those municipalities, which feature bad access to safe water according to figure 7.14 may indeed, be even more serious. Similarly, a majority of Boholanos whom I talked to during field visits 3, 4, 5, and 12 actually stated water supply problems among their prime concerns. Against this background the in average high life expectancy of Boholanos is an interesting feature.

Figure 7.14: Households with access to doubtful water sources 2001

Access, infrastructure and connectivity

The above accounts already indicate that infrastructure and particularly transport routes via road and sea play a significant role to economic, trade and tourism markets as well as to access to social service.

In national comparison, according to figure 6.17, Bohol is recorded in the highest provincial quartile in terms of road density (even exceeding Cebu). Accordingly, one might assume that road access to the rural and peripheral is unproblematic. However, figure 7.15 illustrates that, generally, Tagbilaran City is the ‘centre’ of the road system and province-wide by far best equipped in terms of connecting infrastructure. Almost all visitors enter the island through either the Tagbilaran airport or the Tagbilaran seaport, a fact, which naturally supports the allocation of tourist infrastructure there. Obviously, this is an immense competitive advantage for attracting economic and business activities, social facilities, political decision-makers, and Boholanos (migrants), as well as tourists and international aid organisations to settle in Tagbilaran and its surroundings (compare chapter 8.3.1).

Moreover, during my field trips I learned that solely those roads classified as ‘national’ roads in figure 7.15 are concrete or asphalt roads yet even these have large potholes, are often in bad condition, and allow slow travel by car. This observation, firstly, brings attention back to matters of access, connectivity, and ‘the distance to care’ to markets, facilities, tourist attractions beyond Tagbilaran and national roads. It secondly suggests that the infrastructure conditions pertaining in those municipalities in Bohol and provinces of the Philippines that are officially acknowledged as less well equipped may in fact be entirely inadequate. Thirdly, such findings once again indicate the low data quality and limited reliability of many Philippine information systems.

Correspondingly, while the provincial government (2003b) claims that the province has sufficient electricity supply, I learned that many inhabitants of more remote areas like the Anda peninsula and Inabanga either have no electricity at all or self-generated, unsteady power sources (field visits 4 and 5). Figure 7.15 shows that electricity is limitedly provided for the mountainous areas of the island as well.

Figure 7.15 also indicates that especially Eastern parts of the island are literally cut off from (ferry) connections with neighbouring islands and/or the rest of the country. Generally however, port facilities and ferry connections are more evenly distributed across the province than the road network, and operate, for example, in the peripheral North. The Southern coastline between Jagna and Tagbilaran are not served with more ferry lines and ports, because these two connections are well established and attract travel and trade from neighbouring municipalities.

All in all, the infrastructure situation in Bohol can be stated to be either adequate for a spatially balanced tourism-services and industrial development nor allows for easy access-outreach relations in terms of trade and markets, as well as of services between the peripheral areas, their inhabitants and the government (compare chapter 8).

Figure 7.15: Connectivity infrastructure in Bohol as of 2001

7.3 Analytical inferences across inter- and intra-provincial scales This chapter literally presents a follow-up to chapter 6.3. It summarises, compares, and analyses the themes of disparities of poverty and wealth elaborated for Bohol with those at inter-provincial and -regional scale. Analysis of Bohol is more constrained by data availability and reliability, and is focussed on disparate development related to poverty, agriculture, and tourism issues. Therefore, not all themes are comparable between the investigations of Bohol and of the Philippines. It also ought to be considered that comparisons of poverty patterns are restricted entirely to qualitative assessment, due to the dissimilar derivation process of national/inter-provincial and intra-Bohol poverty data. Table 7.5 provides a schematic overview of the comparative findings to be explained in detail in the following.

Table 7.5: Qualitative assessment of manifestations of intra-Philippine and intra-Bohol disparities

Based on income data Based on health and education data

Human resources matter Economy matters more Population-employment

dilemma ? not reliably assessable

Brain drain from peripheries

to brain gain in centres ? not reliably assessable Indirect

Philippines ≈ Tagbilaran City/ Panglao island)

- residual Bohol

Urban - rural ≈ Urban - rural (with exceptions!)

Coast - interior ≈ /

Partly matching (in South and West), partly not (in the North/

Northeast) Unequal landownership ≈ Unequal landownership Chinese concentration in

In terms of spatial patterns, the North-South divide and focus on Metro Manila in the Philippines faces a South-North divide and focus on Tagbilaran City and partially, Panglao island in Bohol. Alike the national level in Bohol the centres of development are the urbanised areas, especially Tagbilaran City and its surroundings. Implicitly, centre-periphery relations in Bohol have, similar to the whole Philippines, a distinct urban-rural face.

The municipal urban centres (usually the seats of municipal government), especially those at the Southern coast show characteristics of secondary centres, whereas “the more disadvantaged households and groups are in the rural townships, in the rural areas” (expert interview 7). Basically, the more rural and further North and Northeast located municipalities record higher poverty incidence and an overall peripheral status. At the low end of the municipal parameter of disparities of poverty and wealth are Pres. Garcia and Bien Unido²⁹. Spatial disparities within municipalities/communities may, alike at national scale, vary considerably. Morphological differentiation play a role, however not a straight one as at national scale (or they may simply be more precisely assessable in Bohol). Broadly speaking, the coastal/lowland and interior/upland wealth differential prevalent at national level more or less corresponds in Bohol’s South and Southwest. However, large lowlands reaching far into the interior of the island mark the very poor North and Northeast of Bohol. A different example, the relatively wealthy municipalities of Jagna and Garcia Hernandez are comparatively mountainous and have only a narrow lowland coastal strip – where, however, in the case of Jagna a vibrant harbour town is the motor of development (which could possibly hide intra-municipal disparities between coast and mountainous inland).

Spatial disparities of poverty and wealth in Bohol show some, yet again less plain interrelations with sectoral disparities than the inter-provincial patterns. This is mostly due to the almost exclusive agriculture and fishery character of the provincial economy with very little industry operating in Bohol. Note – and this may be an aspect applying to many other

‘agricultural peripheries’ of the Philippines – that agriculture and fisheries are mainly subsistence-oriented activities in Bohol. This is particularly due to small patches of land (compare below), little economies of scale, productivity, and trade.

Tourism services allocate almost exclusively in and around the wealthier centres of Tagbilaran City and Panglao island. This is notwithstanding the fact that tourist attractions are spread around the island. This implies, that the potential of tourism as a lever for more balanced development does not seem to be taken advantage of (compare follow-up in chapter 6.1.3).

29 Note that while Ubay is among the officially poorest municipalities, it is also the location of several recent economic investment incentives (cattle farming) and therefore not considered at the very end of the disparity parameter (compare chapter 8).

The research in Bohol illuminates a high significance of issues of access, infrastructure, and connectivity for socio-economic development in both, (rural) peripheries and (urban) centres.

One expert interviewee summarises the problems peripheral rural communities face:

“… the service delivery is not reaching them adequately, because of the squattered nature it is quite hard to form an organisation, it takes a longer time. Whereas in the urban they can call and ask for assistance. In the rural areas it takes a longer time to get the poor people together” (expert interview 7).

It ought to be noted that the issue of unequal landownership – prevalent in Bohol and the entire Philippines alike – plays an additional and significant role in this context. Unequal landownership deteriorates the marginalised situation of poorer tenants and landless workers as such, that they often lack the (legal, material, time and educational) assets to actively connect and benefit to the centres of assistance (i.e. mobility and establishing linkages requires resources already!). In other words, governmental outreach to the landowners (even if they are absentee owners) is automatically better facilitated than to those who are actually in more urgent need.

Findings on human development in Bohol allow interesting and somewhat summarising inferences for general development patterns. Therefore, they are elaborated in this final part of chapter 7. Precisely, in inter-provincial comparison of the Human Development Index in 2000 (figure 6.24) Bohol is included in the medium quartile, and has actually ‘jumped’ up a class since 1997 (where it had stagnated from 1994). This means that in 2000 Bohol is for the first time included in the same HDI quartile as its ‘wealthy’ neighbour Cebu. This may be related to Bohol’s life expectancy and educational attainment being above Philippine average (figures 6.21 and 6.22).

At the same time, considering the composition of the HDI, and given Boholanos’ outstanding education and life expectancy, the HDI still must have been pushed down by a lack of GDP by capita, here by a lack of economic productivity. These findings firmly suggest that economic aspects impede overall development in Bohol more than social (health and education) aspects. Such inference is underlined by Boholanos’ response to the Bohol Poll question for the most important

problem they face in 2002, as represented in table 7.6. Accordingly, for more than 50% of the respondents the major problem in Bohol is the economy. Interestingly, the agricultural sector and its problems are apparently not counted as to belong to overall economic problems. This may again point at the dominant subsistence nature of the primary sector, and that the arena for economic progress is seen to be based in industry and services (compare perception of

Table 7.6: Most important problem in the respondents’ place (in %)

Economy 57.2

government in chapter 8.1). Moreover noteworthy in the context of this study is obviously the third ranking of problems in public services.

Hence, it follows firstly, that the recent social-indicator-based poverty identification process by the provincial government ignores the de-facto existing economic developmental setting and therefore may adversely identify and target disparities of poverty and wealth.

Secondly, in Philippine comparison Bohol can be clearly classified as a developmental periphery which however recently shows endeavours, prospects and potential to maybe turn into a centre in the long run, especially through its commitment to opening up and benefiting from global markets through tourism services (compare figure 6.25).

Thirdly, when dealing with sectoral issues of poverty-alleviation, agriculture, and tourism, there is also a need to consider related issues of disparate development. This is particularly crucial in times of growth, or as the provincial government of Bohol points out:

“The more development took place, the greater the level of exclusion of the poor leading to a situation where pockets of poverty coexist with levels of relative affluence that often end up hiding the poor from the eyes of LGUs, policy makers and development institutions” (Provincial Government of Bohol 2003b: 2).

The quote declares that material disparities of poverty and wealth may interrelate with disparities of policy outreach in Bohol. Chapters 8 and 9 continue to empirically investigate the content and truth of this assertion.

8. Investigating the effect(iveness) of policy-making on