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“Lahat para sa lahat” (everything to everybody)

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 Disaster Prevention and Management
“Lahat para sa lahat” (everything to everybody): Consensual leadership, social
capital and disaster risk reduction in a Filipino community
Greg Bankoff
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Greg Bankoff , (2015),"“Lahat para sa lahat” (everything to everybody)", Disaster Prevention and
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Received 12 April 2014
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Disaster Prevention and
Management
Vol. 24 No. 4, 2015
pp. 430-447
© Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0965-3562
DOI 10.1108/DPM-04-2014-0063
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“Lahat para sa lahat”
(everything to everybody)
Consensual leadership, social capital
and disaster risk reduction in a
Filipino community
Greg Bankoff
Department of History, University of Hull, Hull, UK
Abstract
Purpose – Effective leadership at the grassroots level can make a crucial difference to disaster risk
reduction (DRR) at the local level. Guidance, however, is often not provided through the visible
structures of local government but through alternative means of articulating power that is no less
real and frequently more effective than more formal agencies. The purpose of this paper is to present
a biography of one such community leader and his influence in the Philippines and how he is able
to foster resilience and reduce risk. These “small men” stand in direct contrast to the more
authoritarian, materialistic and reputedly corrupt nature of governance in general.
Design/methodology/approach – This paper adopts an historical-sociological approach, utilising
archival sources as well as fieldwork to explore the relationship between consensual leadership, social
capital and DRR in the Philippines.
Findings – Social capital and consensual forms of local leadership have their origin in the challenges
posed by daily living in the Philippines. At the grassroots level, Filipino civil society can exhibit a
vibrancy, self-reliance and innovation that has not been given proper recognition. In fact, local
leadership, social capital and DRR are not unrelated aspects of culture but part of the “mutuality” that
exists between people and environment in the archipelago.
Originality/value – This paper employs an innovative historical-sociological approach to explore
the much maligned and often neglected nature of local unofficial leadership in the Philippines in the
context of DRR.
Keywords Disasters, Emergency response, Human-induced disaster, Natural hazard
Paper type Research paper
Disasters are simply a fact of life in the Philippines. A socially and economically vulnerable
population of more than 90 million where over one in four families lives below the poverty
line (NSCB, 2014) combines with one of the world’s most hazardous landmasses to make
disaster a “frequent life experience” (Bankoff, 2003, pp. 179-183). Under such circumstances,
effective local governance can make a difference to community resilience. Leadership,
however, is often not provided through the formal agency of government officials but
through individuals who are able to access unofficial channels of influence. These “small
men” stand in direct contrast to the elitist, materialistic and allegedly corrupt nature of
Philippine democracy that calls into question not only the state’s duty of care to its most
vulnerable citizens but the integrity of the culture itself (Fallows, 1987; Hutchcroft, 1998).
In reality, the archipelago has a long history of informal leadership at the local level
committed to individual and community welfare. Just how effective such current (and past)
associations or networks have proven to be is largely a reflection of their ability to enlist
community support and mobilise collective labour. The ability to influence people and
manage resources can only rarely be credited to the formal attributes of office. Instead,
individuals rely on other means to create an aura of authority and the necessary charisma
 to persuade people to comply with directives. Using archival sources, interviews, site DRR in a
visits and fieldwork notes between 2001 and 2005, this paper sketches a biography of Filipino
local leadership and the influence a single individual can exert in reducing community
risk. A causal relationship between frequent hazards and social capital is posited where
community
local forms of leadership emerge that encourage communities to solve problems by
their own means and on their own terms. Charting the career of one community leader,
it is possible to explore how such an individual is able to broker knowledge, power and 431
resources to claim legitimacy from below and gain external recognition from NGOs and
the state. While personalised leadership of this nature is deeply problematic in a
number of respects, it nevertheless provides an effective means of disaster risk
reduction (DRR) at the local level.

Hazard and social capital

Learning to live with hazards is necessarily part of the daily routine of life in the
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Philippines. Communities have been left largely to their own devices to deal with disasters;
government has become involved in disaster risk management only recently as part of the
centralisation programme of the modern state[1]. The inherent capabilities of communities
to act for their own collective benefit have found expression in the notion of social capital.
The term refers to the features of organisation such as trust, norms and networks that
enable communities (of varying scale) to coordinate their social and economic endeavours
(Coleman, 1988). Social capital is a measure of the confidence that a contribution freely
given will be reciprocated at an appropriate time and by the development of group
relations that morally enforce this code. Woolcock identifies three kinds of social capital:
bonding (ties between family, friends, neighbours and associates of similar demographic
characteristics); bridging (ties among people from different ethnic, locational and
occupational backgrounds but of similar socio-economic status); and linking (external ties
with those in positions of wider societal influence) (Woolcock, 2001). Access to resources
through network ties are prevalent in most cultures (Swaan, 1988; Linden, 1996) but have
been largely ignored in the Philippines prior to the radicalisation of the 1970s
(Constantino-David, 1998; Luna, 2001). Nor has social capital often been looked at from
the perceptive of a community’s ability to confront hazards and manage disasters.
The role of social capital in disaster management has received some attention in more
recent years especially as regards volunteerism and its potential for community-based
disaster risk management (CBDRM) in the aftermath of major events such as the Kobe
Earthquake of 1995 or the Marmara Earthquake of 1999 ( Jalali, 2002; Nakagawa and
Shaw, 2004). Emphasis, too, has been placed on the importance of place in generating
particular forms of associational activities, a geography of social capital and “a recognition
that context matters to the outcomes of social processes” (Mohan and Mohan, 2002, p. 202).
While no single factor can suffice to explain why location and circumstances are so
conducive to the formation of social capital in the Philippines, perhaps the important role
hazard has played in the daily life of its peoples encourages forms of mutual dependence
and cooperative activity. There is a long history of formal and informal networks
committed to individual and community welfare that enhance people’s capacity to
withstand the magnitude and frequency of daily misfortune as experienced in the
archipelago (Luna, 1999, pp. 315-316). Evidence of community associations can be dated
back to the religious fraternities, reciprocal labour arrangements, unions, clubs and parent
teacher associations beginning in the seventeenth century and that currently finds
expression in the proliferation of People’s Organisations (POs) (Po, 1980, pp. 31-32;
Kerkvliet, 1992; Scott, 1992; Bankoff, 2007).
 DPM The roots of social capital are variously explained in terms of trust (Fukuyama,
24,4 1995). Trust comes into play in high-risk situations where uncertainty promotes
confidence and institutional strictures enforce normative codes (Cook, 2005). In such
a disaster-prone environment as the Philippines, trust reposes in the family and the
extended community that is often cast in terms of fictive kinship. In his now celebrated
thesis on the importance of the frontier to understanding the history of the USA,
432 Frederick Jackson Turner credits the trials and tribulations of settling the American
West with the promotion of rugged individualism and the spread of democratic
institutions (Turner, 1893/1972, p. 22). Perhaps, on the contrary, the frequency and
magnitude of hazards that Filipinos confront on an almost daily basis promote a more
abstract sense of community welfare and encourage forms of community support and
reciprocity. There is even a word for it – bayanihan (from the root bayan or people)
and those who ignore its unwritten tenets are noticed and find it difficult to obtain
assistance when they need it most (Bankoff, 2007). The everyday hardships posed
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by living in the archipelago suggest an intriguing relationship between risk on the one
hand and the number and vigour of civic engagement on the other: Those geographical
regions most exposed to personal misfortune and community danger are precisely
those areas where such associations and networks seem to proliferate most readily.
The significant role that NGOs and POs play in contemporary society might not only
be the product of more recent political upheavals but have a basis in historical
antecedents and so raise doubts over what can rightly be termed the origins of civil
society (Bankoff, 2012).

Organising social capital: Buklod Tao

While people in the Philippines have a long history of civic associations, many
communities in urban and peri-urban areas across the archipelago are only recently
established. The accepted wisdom is that newly developed areas suffer from poor
community decision making and lack of strong leadership (Shaw and Goda, 2004,
p. 32)[2]. In the Philippines, sectors of the population newly radicalised during the
administration of President Ferdinand Marcos in the late 1960s gave rise to the emergence
of progressive or development-oriented NGOs that blossomed with the restoration of
democratic government after 1986 (Clarke, 1998, pp. 70-71). The public recognition that
such organisations receive, however, and their largely middle-class management tends to
conceal the continuing presence of local community-based associations now denominated
as POs. If the relationship between NGOs and POs is often somewhat ambiguous, the
emphasis in the recent Disaster Risk Reduction Management Act 2010 placed on CBDRM
constitutes belated acknowledgement of a community’s inherent social capital (Heijmans
and Victoria, 2001, pp. 13-18)[3].
Buklod Tao is a registered samahan (non-profit association) formed by over 700 families
in North and South Libis, informal dwellers who live on a narrow seven-hectare strip of
land in Barangay Banaba bounded by the Nangka and San Mateo-Marikina rivers within
the municipality of San Mateo, province of Rizal. This is a peri-urban community on the
fringe of Metro Manila where most people earn a livelihood as construction workers,
factory employees, street vendors, maids or laundrywomen in adjacent more affluent
subdivisions. Water from the heavily silted Nangka River is frequently unable to discharge
into the main channel and is pushed back upstream creating eddies that erode the
riverbank on which the community stands. The situation is further aggravated by an
embankment built to protect a middle-class suburb that diverts the flow of the Marikina
River from its natural catchment area and causes severe flooding and accelerated erosion
 on the Libis side (Oxfam, 2011, pp. 135-143). The loss of houses into the river is now a DRR in a
regular occurrence (Plate 1). Filipino
As a “new” community, there was little evidence of social capital in Libis. In 1995,
however, a construction company won the contract to build a new bridge across
community
the river about 200 metres upstream from the community and purchased a site on the
adjacent riverbank where it planned to erect a cement batching plant. Ownership of
the site was disputed as local residents had been cultivating the plot as a tumana 433
or communal vegetable garden since 1947. The company then preceded to infill the site,
raising its height relative to the surrounding area and constructing a 250 metre dike to
protect the plant from floodwaters. Many houses especially in South Libis were
sandwiched between the walls of the adjacent subdivision and the cement plant leaving
them even more vulnerable to floodwaters.
A tropical storm soon caused widespread flooding in the community. Damage was
extensive and some children nearly drowned when they were trapped by the raging
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floodwaters. Indignation in Libis ran high and families banded together to picket
the plant and barricade the site’s entrance. Community members turned out en masse
at a protest rally held in front of the munisipiyo building of San Mateo in February 1996
despite police attempts to prevent them. Contact was also made with progressive NGOs
that provided community members with the necessary legal advice to lobby officials
and respective national agencies[4]. In a subsequent public hearing, the Sangguniang
Panlalawigan of Rizal province issued a temporary injunction against the construction
company and overturned the municipal ordinance that had re-designation the tumana
for industrial use[5].
This successful campaign prompted concerned members of the community to band
together to form a civic association called Buklod Tao, literally “People Bonding Together”.

Plate 1.
Houses on the
Marikina River
undermined by the
rapidly eroding
riverbank, Libis
Source: Photo by author
 DPM Organised initially to facilitate the protest, the association subsequently initiated projects
24,4 to enhance the community’s welfare and security. The association, however, has far deeper
roots than the successful initiation of community protest at the construction of a cement
plant. Nor can its origins really be attributable to a community history of such networks as
Libis is a post-1945 migrant settlement and its inhabitants do not share a common cultural
tradition of reciprocity as might be found in more long-standing rural centres. Instead
434 Buklod Tao’s formal legal entity as a samahan disguises its older existence as a Basic
Ecclesial Community (BEC) formed under the Social Action Center of the Diocese of
Antipolo. The role of prayer groups and religious organisations in providing assistance
to members has been noted in many cultures. People may rely more on church-based
networks and religious leaders to see them through times of crisis when social security
provisions are rudimentary or non-existent (Marshall, 1991; Airriess et al., 2008). Already
well established in Libis, “cells” or buklods of 10-12 neighbours have held weekly prayer
meetings since the early 1990s where the physical as well as the spiritual welfare of the
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community was discussed (Abinales, 2002a, b, 2003).

Fostering a greater sense of community involvement in Libus has not always been
easy and prior attempts to initiate small-scale livelihood projects proved unsuccessful.
However, the protest rally and organisation of Buklod Tao broadened community
support. When the association initiated a three-day training seminar on CBDRM
with the support of the local diocese and a national NGO in 1995, it was attended by
some 30 community members. A community Disaster Response Committee (DRC) was
established and drew up a disaster management plan that identified flood-risk areas,
designated evacuation centres, organised rescue teams and instituted a simple early
warning system. To be effective, though, rescue teams required basic kit such as
ropes, flashlights, megaphones, first-aid boxes and especially boats. To secure these
necessities, Buklod Tao was able to secure a grant of PHP 30,000 ($660) from the
Royal Netherlands Embassy in Manila. Drills were organised to acquaint rescue team
members with their new equipment and a campaign initiated to keep the drainage
canals free from garbage by making each family responsible for clearing the ditches
immediately in front of their homes.
Less than two months later in August 1997, Typhoon Winnie caused severe flooding
in the community, sweeping away a couple of houses. Some families required
rescue and many others needed evacuated to the chapel and the elementary school.
But there were no deaths and many people were able to save their furniture and
equipment (Oxfam, 2011, pp. 136-138). On this and subsequent occasions, the DRC
earned the community’s trust by safeguarding people’s interests and equitably
distributing relief goods. Post-disaster reports also improved the effectiveness of the
association’s activities. Recommendations, for instance, in the aftermath of Typhoon
Babs (October 1998) included the establishment of a community kitchen, the purchase
of a portable toilet, and the provision of anti-snake bite serum (Abinales, 1998). The
repeated nature of flood risk in the community has helped Buklod Tao maintain local
engagement through schemes such as planting bamboo seedlings on heavily eroded
riverbanks and sandbagging other unprotected areas. These developments have been
noted by equally vulnerable neighbouring communities who have requested assistance
in the formation and training of their own DRCs. Now Libis even provides fully
equipped rescue teams to support other less well-endowed communities in times of
need (Manuel Abinales, personal communication, 11 October 2005), and their rescue
boats even achieved national notoriety when one of them was featured on the front
page of the Philippine Daily Inquirer on 27 September 2009 during Typhoon Ondoy.
 The need to “facilitate a flow of information providing a basis for action” in the face of DRR in a
common and repeated danger binds communities together (Ritchie and Gill, 2007, Filipino
p. 109). The people of Libis are involved in a dense system of often overlapping social
networks that link them to one another, to similar neighbouring communities and to the
community
wider society. As such, Woolcock’s three categories of bonding, bridging and linking social
capital are all evident. Within the community, too, individuals are enmeshed in multiplex
relations where a person is simultaneously kin, neighbour, co-worker, church group 435
member or belongs to the same association (Boissevain, 1974, pp. 31-33). The existence of
these networks may presage social capital but the latter does not guarantee that
communities are any more resilient. Most neighbourhoods in the Philippines share a similar
tradition of trust and reciprocity. What differentiates Libis from other communities is the
nature of its leadership, the “small men” on whom community welfare largely depends.

A biography of local leadership

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Political analysts of the Philippines are primarily concerned with the institutionalised
mechanisms of good government and largely ignore forms of community governance.
Leadership is regarded as largely a matter of patronage by an entrenched landowning
oligarchy at the national level that is seldom benevolent and that is more often than not
characterised by extraction, expropriation and coercion (Landé, 1965; Anderson, 1988).
In the regions, it is often exercised by “bosses”, local strongmen who prosper at different
levels of state power (Hutchcroft, 1991; Sidel, 1999). It is this same leadership that James
Fallows and others blame so much for the archipelago’s “damaged culture” (Fallows, 1987).
At the local level, there are few opportunities for personal aggrandisement and self-
enrichment: the pickings are too few and poverty is a great equaliser. Within communities
such as Libis, too, strong-arm methods generally prove to be counterproductive and
leadership depends much more on negotiation and need fulfilment. A community leader
earns respect and commands a following through his or her ability to tap external
resources and distribute them. A person’s ability to direct affairs is forged through
multiple webs of reciprocity and working for the benefit of the community.
Traditional leadership among Austronesian speakers is characterised as “chiefly”
where political rank and ritual status is mainly ascriptive and attributed to genealogy as
opposed to the non-Austronesian speaking peoples of Melanesia where status is largely
acquired through prowess or skill (Scaglion, 1996). Pre-colonial societies in the Philippines
are described as chiefly though it is unclear to what extent the hereditary nature of
datuship was a product of Spanish invention (Scott, 1994). Community leadership in
relatively new settlements like Libis, however, shares more in common with the acquired
forms of status associated with non-Austronesian speakers. Power among the “big- or
great-men” proposed by the likes of Marshall Sahlins and Maurice Godelier was not
institutionalised but personal: “The outcome of a series of acts which elevate a person
above the common herd and attract about him a coterie of loyal, lesser men” (Sahlins, 1963;
Lindstrom, 1981; Godelier, 1986). Sahlins defines a leader’s attributes in terms of the
importance of public oratory, webs of reciprocity and the ability to amass and distribute
goods (Sahlins, 1963, pp. 289-291). Later scholars argued that leadership depends as much
on control over knowledge as over wealth, that exchange partners also become indebted in
a commerce of ideas and that the men “who command attractive explanatory systems
gather followers” (Lindstrom, 1984, p. 294).
Sahlin has been criticised for stereotyping and oversimplifying Melanesian political
forms to such an extent that his “big man” thesis was “probably the exception rather
than the rule” (Velzen, 1973; Baker, 1983; Roscoe, 2000, p. 81). In Southeast Asia, the
 DPM model has enjoyed some popularity to describe pre-European leadership in maritime
24,4 areas where local strongmen were able to command loyalty through the provision
of material resources, projecting their prowess and utilising violence (Wolters, 1982,
pp. 4-10). While recognising the dangers of applying models to very different contexts
(Scaglion, 1996, p. 21), the nature of authority in Libis exhibits striking parallels with
the forms of acquired leadership described by Sahlins. Perhaps, this is to be expected in
436 a relatively new and ethnically diverse settlement. Yet here the local leader is not so
much a “big man” as a “small man”, where the diminutive simply denotes the restricted
geographical sphere within which influence is exercised, a lack of ability to enforce
commands and a desire to further community interests over one’s own.
However, there is still little doubt about where authority resides in Libis: the founding
president and driving force of Buklod Tao is Manuel Abinales, more usually called Ka
Noli. Ka Noli was a local parish BEC tagadiwa (facilitator) and instrumental in organising
the disaster management training seminar that led to the creation of Libis’s DRC.
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As such, he represents the multifaceted nature of community leadership being vested

with both a practical managerial role associated with environmental security and a
more spiritual one concerned with the community’s moral welfare. Apart from his
non-remunerative role as the association’s president, however, he holds no formal office.
Simply to be in his company is often sufficient association to command the mano, the
pressing of the hand to the forehead in sign of respect by children and youngsters[6].
Moreover, his networks increasingly extends beyond the community. He was the sole PO
representative to address the First National Conference on CBDRM sponsored by the
Office of Civil Defense (OCO) and the National Defense College held at Camp Aguinaldo
in January 2002. More recently, too, he was instrumental in convening a meeting in June
2010 between San Mateo barangay leaders, municipal officials and OCD personnel to
discuss the local implementation of the new DRR Management Act[7]. Ka Noli is also
frequently invited to meetings and forums organised by concerned non-government
associations and academicians. These external recognitions of “worth” undoubtedly raise
his status within the community.
Just how Ka Noli earns respect and is able to exercise influence in the absence of coercion
has many parallels with the acquired leadership model. In particular, his links with the
“external world”, here defined as outside the municipality of San Mateo, are important.
At each step, whether it was establishing the network of buklods, organising the protest over
the cement batching plant, or creating the DRC and equipping rescue squads, he was able to
tap outside sources to aid, advise or resource the project: the Social Action Center of the
Diocese of Antipolo; Tanggol Kalikasan, the legal arm of the Haribon Foundation; and
the Citizen Disaster Response Center and the Center for Disaster Preparedness, two of
the most influential NGOs concerned with CBDRM. He has also forged links with De La
Salle University (Manila) with respect to the National Service Training Program/Civic
Welfare Training Service that now allows college students a choice between community
welfare work and military cadetship on Saturday afternoons. Together, too, Buklod Tao
and De La Salle University have developed a computer-based communications and text
messaging service to better disseminate early warnings to community members (Pineda,
2012). He refers to these external agents as the community’s “allies”:

Buklod Tao has another ally in the community, the Center for Positive Futures. It is a
technical and vocational High School with one branch located here in our Barangay.
Our mothers and the kids of the community are benefiting out of this partnership (Manuel
Abinales, personal communication November 2005).
 These partnerships with external allies are crucial to his ability to tap outside resources DRR in a
for the community. Of course, the “goods” Ka Noli deals with are far removed from the Filipino
ceremonial prestige ware that pre-European contact leaders redistributed ( Junker,
1999). In the late 1980s, he called upon his diocesan connections to secure a monthly
community
contribution of 20 sacks of mainly corn and bulgur wheat that, in turn, were
obtained from Christian charities overseas. These basic foodstuffs were subsequently
repacked as parcels and given to the community’s most indigent members. He was also 437
involved in attempts to start small livelihood projects within the community in the
early 1990s. Many of these schemes proved no more than short-lived “dole-outs”,
inadequately resourced and without the long-term commitment of external partners.
However, his ability to secure external resources increased appreciably in the aftermath
of the successful protest action against the construction company.
The protest allowed Ka Noli to diversify his network of social contacts away from
more “traditional” sources closely associated with the Catholic Church. Progressive
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NGOs, international aid organisations and foreign embassies constitute an important

additional fund of external sponsors and open still further opportunities. Apart from
securing the initial small grant from the Netherlands Embassy to equip the disaster
rescue teams, Ka Noli and Buklod Tao are involved in a whole range of variegated
livelihood enhancement and environment schemes. With external funds, the community
has experimented with raising organic poultry, hog rearing, dried fruits, herbal remedies,
soap production and even skin whiteners[8]. Through the Christian Foundation for
Children and the Aged, Ka Noli secured monthly grants that paid the educational and
grocery expenses for children attending school and that supplemented pensioners’
meagre budgets. Nor is this latter scheme restricted to Libis but extends to recipients
in municipalities even beyond San Mateo involving a total of over 800 children. In both
cases, Ka Noli went from household to household interviewing prospective beneficiaries
and sending their portfolios to head office in Metro Manila where the final selections were
made. Nearly all his decisions, however, were confirmed (Abinales, 2002a). In other
words, there are few households within a community of over 700 households in which his
“good offices” have not been felt in one way or another (Plate 2).
As important as this ability to tap external sources and redistribute goods is,
Ka Noli’s influence in the community is also complemented by his ability to convey
interpretative frameworks that offer knowledge, understanding and, most importantly
of all, salvation to community members. He is a visionary and a purveyor of dreams
about a better world. He provides explanatory schemas of life that transcend the
principles of local atomism and offer people the hope of better things to come based
on collective endeavour, communal labour and common purpose. At first, this vision
was expressed solely within a Christian context, albeit a radicalised version inspired by
BECs. As a young man, he spent four years in a seminary run by the Belgian-based
Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary but never completed his noviciate.
BECs offered the community both a rationalisation for and a means of escape from
hardship but with the passing of time could not satisfy what Ka Noli describes as the
people’s need “to satisfy stomachs first” (Abinales, 2002a).
The extent to which religion underpins progressive movements in the Philippines has
long been recognised and many BECs emerged as part of the challenge to President
Marcos’s declaration of Martial Law in 1972. Traditional Sunday sermons are replaced
by Bible-based prayer services in which people apply the gospels to understanding their
local situations[9]. Within Libis, prayer groups provide a rare link to more traditional
forms of social capital: the nineteenth century term turnuhan used to describe reciprocal
 DPM
24,4

438
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Plate 2.
Ka Noli with one
of the communities
original fibreglass
rescue boats secured
with the aid of the
Netherlands
Embassy small
grant, Libis
Source: Photo by author

labour arrangements long fallen into disuse in the wider society is still used to denote
the roster in leading the weekly bible discussions. The local DRC provides another forum
in which local residents find solutions to the immediate problems that confront them:
CBDRM offers effective answers to DRR through empowering people to tackle the
underlying problems of poverty, marginalisation, environmental degradation and
political disempowerment. Nor does it detract from the Christian message[10].
As Lindstrom concludes with respect to Melanesian societies: “Achieved political
status and power sometimes depend as much on discourses of wisdom as on intercourses
of pig”: not an entirely inapposite analogy given the nature of some of the livelihood
schemes instituted by Ka Noli in Libis (Lindstrom, 1984, p. 306).
While Ka Noli possesses the means to persuade and the vision to inspire, he lacks the
means to enforce his leadership. He does not have the prerogatives of office, the sanction
of law or the fear of henchmen to implement decisions. Instead, he must rely mainly on
consensual approval: a person of influence, not authority (Ogan, 1991, p. 235). There are
 other means, though, through which his leadership is bolstered. Kinship is important. DRR in a
While Ka Noli’s family only moved to San Mateo in 1971, he has eight siblings. Some, Filipino
of course, have moved away but others still remain in the community and all of them
form part of his support network. They undoubtedly contribute financially to his upkeep
community
to an undetermined extent and it was through one of his sister’s connections that contact
was initially established with a Dutch aid agency. Though the overture proved
unsuccessful, this source led to securing the small embassy grant used to first equip the 439
community’s rescue teams. The contribution of his mother, too, who was elected
president of the local home owners association in the late 1980s and who had been
instrumental in the construction of the community’s chapel was an additional source of
contacts. One of his brother-in-laws is also president of the Mini-Pastoral Council of the
community’s Holy Cross Chapel and the two worked in tandem to promote a more
developmental form of pastoral planning.
For those not bound by familial ties, other bonds of fictive kinship are entered into:
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even in 2002, Ka Noli had more than ten kumpadres in the immediate area. As godfather
to a child, the relationship creates a close bond between adults. At a still wider level
of extrapolation, the notion of brotherhood is maintained through the oaths which all
members of Buklod Tao, the DRC and the rescue boat teams must take. On a community
basis, Ka Noli’s reputation as a “big brother” and an impartial arbitrator involves him in a
complex set of relationships where he has to be, in his own words: “Lahat para sa lahat
(everything to everybody)”. People come to see him with problems that encompass land
disputes, family troubles, health questions, legal matters, transportation needs and
advice on the preparation of official documents (Abinales, 2002a). Ultimately, as Sahlins
writes: “Little or no authority is given by social ascription: leadership is a creation – a
creation of followship” (Sahlins, 1963, p. 290).
From the perspective of the community, the official organs of state governance often
appear distant, uncaring and potentially threatening: even the municipal government
of San Mateo can seem removed from the everyday demands of life in Libis. Faced with
the imminent collapse of many dwellings from erosion in October 2005, the munisipiyo
offered families nothing more than a hundred empty rice sacks to use as sandbags when
the situation demanded the immediate relocation of households and concrete ribbing
of the embankment. These agencies and officials, however, are not without power to
affect the community; clearly, they possess a certain type of authority as manifest in the
case of the cement batching plant dispute and the reclassification of the tumana from
agricultural to industrial use. But this influence is perceived as external to the community
and is exploited or ignored as best it might. Thus the tumana usurped by the
construction company and expropriated by the local government has since been
“reclaimed” by the community and once more given over to vegetables and agricultural
pursuits (Manuel Abinales, personal communication, November 2005).
Until recently, Ka Noli and Buklod Tao have had as little to do with the municipality
as possible, investigated the legality of its actions and viewed its officials as a hindrance
to community development. During the protest campaign against the construction
company, there was little contact and no sense of a formal relationship with municipal
authorities. From the latter’s viewpoint, Ka Noli has often been seen as an impediment to
San Mateo’s development, blocking “progress” through his questioning of a project’s
legality or non-compliance with environmental regulations. He has been frequently called
“sira ulo” (crazy) (Manuel Abinales, personal communication, November 2005)[11].
An “absence of cooperation and communication” was also blamed for the inability of the
local Barangay Disaster Coordinating Council to coordinate their rescue operations with
 DPM Buklod Tao during the severe floods that overwhelmed the community in September
24,4 2009 as a result of Typhoon Ondoy (Abinales and Mercado, 2012, p. 23)[12].
However, since then, relations have begun to improve. DRR is formally recognised
under the 2010 Act and representatives from civil society including civil society
organisations are mandated to be included at every level of the new disaster management
structure. San Mateo was among the first munisipiyos to implement the new law and
440 stands as an “exemplar” in this respect to other LGUs (Brower et al., 2014, p. 301)[13].
On the barangay level, Buklod Tao has now been formally recognised by the new
Barangay DRR Management Council, and the two engage in joint training and coordinate
their rescue responses. As Ka Noli so succinctly puts it, while formerly barangay officials
did not support the work of Buklod Tao, “now they are on the same page” (Abinales and
Mercado, 2012, p. 34). There are also other allies “out there”, too, in the wider society: allies
in the diocese, social action groups, NGOs, concerned professionals, and even among the
agencies and institutions of the provincial and national government. The nature of
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modern leadership in Libis recalls to mind in some respects a small-scale Southeast Asian
maritime polity of the past doing its best to steer a course between the reefs and shoals of
adversity and the fair winds of opportunity that lie beyond its “borders”.

“Small men”
Yet the Philippines are not Melanesia and Ka Noli is not a “big man”. In fact, the term
literally translated into Tagalog has somewhat negative connotations: a “malaking tao”
has more the imputation of a “big fish” in government or business, one that devours the
small fry around him. Such an association is hardly applicable or appropriate to either
the scale or the nature of leadership exercised in a community like Libis. Nonetheless,
the model suggested by Sahlins and elaborated on and criticised by almost every
subsequent scholar interested in the exercise of authority in the region has the
virtue of providing an analytical framework from which to discuss the basis of
non-institutionalised power at the community level that does not conform to western
political forms or terminology. The term has also gained acceptance as a means of
analysing more recent developments in Melanesia where the need to extend traditional
models of leadership to contemporary governance and commerce has been
acknowledged (Scaglion, 1996, pp. 14-21; Hennings, 2007).
If Ka Noli is not a “big man”, he is certainly not a “boss” either. Instead, he exercises
a form of influence that does not easily conform to western models of leadership.
A pervasive cynicism runs through most scholarly analyses of power structures in the
contemporary Philippines that depicts authority figures as extractive, exploitative and
coercive. The exercise of power is often characterised as patrimonial, vertical ties of
patron-client relations between a superordinate and a subordinate to the disadvantage
of the latter (Landé, 1965; Schmidt et al., 1977). Even local offices and resources are seen
as being captured by the elite or advantaged groups who succeed in channelling
resources for their own benefit, at the expense of other people, particularly the poor
(Platteau and Abraham, 2002).
On being asked to consider an appropriate descriptor of his role in the community,
Ka Noli replied that a more suitable designation would be either taong
katanggap-tanggap, a person acceptable to the community or taong pinakikinggan ng
komunidad, a person listened to by the community and respected for his opinion. As he
points out, he leads by example: one where he is “not the extractor but the extractee”.
It was Ka Noli who shouldered much of the initial incidental expenses incurred in the
running of Buklod Tao in relation to transportation, photocopying, printing, internet,
 computer rentals and the like. His house also doubled as the association’s office, DRR in a
meeting room and library. This is what he calls “pagtataya” or investing (literally Filipino
wagering) his personal stake in the community’s welfare (Manuel Abinales, personal
communication, November 2005). He is also a very eloquent and persuasive speaker
community
who can chose his words to suit the audience and the occasion. The importance of
oratory and the ability to represent the community to the outside world has been duly
noted as an important leadership quality in other cultures (Strathern, 1966, p. 358; 441
Harrison, 1989). At the same time, power in Libis is only nominally democratic. True,
Ka Noli is the elected president of Buklod Tao but that office has little in the way of
institutionalised powers and what authority he wields is exercised in other ways.
Nonetheless, the system of governance he exercises is plural in that it allows for the
inclusion of many voices, including voices of dissent, into the decision-making and
consensual-forming process. It may even be more inclusive of those most at risk of
exclusion and marginalisation in a more institutionalised democratic process[14].
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There is a downside, however, to this form of leadership that also bears a striking
resemblance to the “big man” model. Accordingly, a leader must eventually overreach
himself and his increasing need to extract goods to maintain his reputation ultimately
lead his followers to desert him (Sahlins, 1968, p. 90). Exactly how long an individual
like Ka Noli can be expected to carry the “weight” of his community on his shoulders
without the support of institutional structures or formal recompense is a matter of
stamina and circumstance. He has been president of Buklod Tao since 1997 and while
there are other officers in the association, he is still its driving force. “Burn-out” of
leaders is a constant risk in communities like Libis and since the corresponding
organisation is usually built around a single person or a small number of individuals,
their retirement or withdrawal from active participation often ensures the association’s
demise. This over dependence on individuals is a recognised local phenomenon and
merits popular analogy in the phrase “ningas kugon” or “flaming cogon grass”,
an expression derived from the way that plant (Imperata cylindrical ) flares brightly
went first lit but is rapidly consumed (Hollnsteiner, 1963, p. 125). But unlike the
Melanesian “big man”, POs place much more importance in trying to develop second
line leadership through mentoring, coaching and modelling to prepare the next
generation to take-up “the torch and passion”. So important is this aspect of leadership
to Ka Noli that he ultimately assesses his own record in these terms: “And when the
time has come that things are going smoothly as undertaken by other leaders without
me and without them noticing I am no longer at the helm, then I could say that I have
become a successful leader who has begotten [a] new breed of community leaders”
(Manuel Abinales, personal communication, November 2005). Evidently, however, such
a stage had not yet been reached by 2014.
Rather than calling Ka Noli and his counterparts in POs around the Philippines
“big men”, they should be more aptly described as “small men”. Rather than seeking
self-aggrandisement and amassing a “fund of power”, this type of leader aims to
increase the community’s resilience and downplays individual contribution by
promoting the association rather than the self. In return, he receives the community’s
respect and widespread acceptance of his leadership. This form of leadership has been
observed in other peri-urban communities in the Philippines. In a recent article on a
fisher community, Sibulan, in the Visayas, Magne Knudsen notes the role of
neighbourhood leaders grounded in local kinship and livelihood relations who are able
to represent their localities interests. He describes these (invariably) men as brokers
rather than patrons who share many of the characteristics of Ka Noli (Knudsen, 2013).
 DPM Unlike Sibulan, however, there is also an important sense of a wider community
24,4 apparent in the manner Buklod Tao freely shares its expertise with other communities
based upon and drawing from its origins in basic Christian notions of brotherhood
(Cannell, 1999). The Association has a network of “affiliates” that extends not only
to nearby settlements and the adjoining province of Quezon but to the Visayan Islands
hundreds of kilometres away. Ka Noli and other community members are invited to
442 hold workshops and training sessions in these places. Together Buklod Tao and its
sister associations now constitute what Ka Noli calls kapitbahayan or neighbourhood
clusters. He describes how these function in terms of “living and doing things like one
harmonious body – a harmonization of things in the community and the re-integration
of spiritual (not religious) life” (Manuel Abinales, personal communication, November
2005). As such, they represent an interesting experiment in a parallel structure of
community governance.
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Conclusion: risk and local leadership

While Ka Noli and his like may be “small men” in the sense that they largely sacrifice
their own aggrandisement for the interests of others, the nature of their leadership and
the spirit of the communities they represent suggest that the strength of civil society
in the Philippines has been seriously underestimated. Libis and the thousands of other
neighbourhoods scattered about the archipelago are not the products of a “damaged
culture” but actually the manifestation of a very resilient one. At the grassroots level,
Filipino civil society exhibits a vibrancy, self-reliance and innovation that have not
been given proper recognition, and local leadership has been tarnished by comparison
to inappropriate national models.
Both social capital and the consensual form of local leadership have their origin in the
challenges posed by daily life in the Philippines. Reciprocity at the community level is
manifest in a long history of formal and informal networks and the necessity for
intersectoral problem-solving beyond the capabilities of the individual or family ( Jocano,
1969, 1975). Social capital is evident not only in long-standing traditional communities
but also in more recent settlements like Libis. The everyday hardships posed by a
disaster-prone landmass suggest an intriguing relationship between threats of this nature
and the vigour of CBDRM (Bankoff, 2003). The underlying vibrancy of civil society in the
archipelago may lie in the need for communities largely bereft of government support to
mobilise and deploy their own human resources (Bankoff, 2007).
Social capital alone, however, is not sufficient to make a neighbourhood resilient.
Uncertainty may encourage high levels of dyadic trust and lead to the emergence
of committed exchange partners but some communities are better managers of risk than
others (Cook, 2005, p. 10). Perhaps, the difference between effective and ineffective social
capital is local leadership. The importance of leadership within formal and informal
community-based organisations has been noted in other studies, especially in relation to
the Kobe Earthquake of 1995 and the Gujarat Earthquake of 2001 (Shaw and Goda, 2004,
p. 21; Nakagawa and Shaw, 2004). Indeed, in the latter case, many NGO members
identified community leadership as “the most essential aspect of the successful
rehabilitation in both urban and rural areas” (Nakagawa and Shaw, 2004, p. 28). In their
study of one neighbourhood in Kobe, Nakagawa and Shaw attributed the resilience of the
residents of Mano to the 30-year leadership of a community organisation by a single
charismatic individual whose career path singularly resembles that of Ka Noli
(Nakagawa and Shaw, 2004, p. 18). In this respect, too, the importance of priests and lay
preachers as informal community leaders in times of crisis and recovery has been
 observed (Airriess et al., 2008, pp. 1336, 1341). To what extent, however, disaster as DRR in a
a frequent life experience facilitates the emergence of such individuals, unfortunately, Filipino
is beyond the provenance of one biography of local leadership to gauge.
Local leadership, social capital and DRR are not unrelated aspects of culture in the
community
Philippines but part of the “mutuality” that exists between people and environment:
Anthony Oliver-Smith argues that disasters occur when there is an imbalance between
the two (Oliver-Smith, 1999). A vibrant civil society and proactive local leadership, 443
perhaps, may be a response to such an imbalance and particularly to the deficiencies
of state services. Whatever the case, the impression of Filipino society from the
grassroots level is very difficult to reconcile with the one depicted by James Fallows
and others. In the final analysis, it may be also a question of the perspective one
chooses to take: from the top down, the Philippines may appear more of a “damaged
culture”; from the bottom up, it presents an alternative functionality. As Ka Noli so
eloquently expresses this distinction:
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My style of doing things and leadership is not compatible with the government structure.
That is the reason people who clamour for me to run for a public office fail to persuade me.
Public office in the Philippines is very, very alluring. But it has inclinations to alienate those
who do not ride with the currents of Filipino political ways. And I will never be part of that
kind of alienation. It is more fulfilling for me to be with the community folks, charting our
simple future, than being a voice in the wilderness in the session halls of the munisipiyo or the
Sangguniang Barangay (Manuel Abinales, personal communication, November 2005).

Notes
1. Systematic government organisation had to await the promulgation of the Civil Defense Act
(RA 1190) in 1954. The principal body currently charged with overseeing disaster
management is the National DRR and Management Council (formerly the National Disaster
Coordinating Council) established by Republic Act 10121 of 2010. As previously, the Office
of Civil Defense (i.e. the military) remains the implementing agency (Brower et al., 2014).
2. However, Brown and Ashman’s (1996, p. 1477) review of African and Asian case studies
also showed that social capital can be generated relatively quickly in new social settings.
3. NGO staff generally refute the notion that their members conceal the presence of POs but
while the former term is often employed synonymously with that of civil society, the latter is
rarely used in the same manner (Ferrer, 1997, p. 13).
4. Initially contact was made with an alternative group of lawyers, Saligan, who then referred
them to Tanggol Kalikasan, the legal arm of the Haribon Foundation, the largest
environmental non-government organisation in the Philippines.
5. The account of these events is based on an interview with Manuel Abinales (2002a) and
various written sources (Abinales, 2002b, 2003).
6. Never having experienced this before, I initially thought the children wanted to shake
my hand.
7. As a result of this meeting, the Municipality of San Mateo enacted its own DRR Ordinance
in August 2010 (Brower et al., 2014, pp. 301-302).
8. The present range of Buklod Tao products can now be purchased online from its web site:
www.buklodtaoinc.org/#!products/c5b6
9. The role of one such group, the Kristianong Katilingban on Negros received international
media attention due to the arrest of the Australian Columban priest Fr. Brian Gore in 1982
(Stannard, 1984).
 DPM 10. I have observed that explanations that invoke the “root causes of vulnerability” (Blakie
et al., 1994) in a mantra-like fashion take on almost religious overtones at times and lend
24,4 themselves to creed substitutes under certain circumstances.
11. Dealings with village headmen (kapitan sa barangay) have been generally more constructive
and the latter have sometimes cooperated in local environmental protection advocacy.
12. Loh Kah Seng’s recent article in Philippine Studies provides a perceptive analysis of how
444 Barangay Banaba’s resident fared during Typhoon Ondoy (international code name
Ketsana) and the important role played by Buklod Tao (Seng, 2014).
13. Local Government Units are referred to as LGUs in the Philippines.
14. On dissent in the community, see the documentary by Michael Vincent Dela Cruz Mercado
Ang Buklod Tao at ang Barangay Banaba and the transcripts of interviews contained in the
BA thesis of the same title (Mercado, 2012).
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Further reading
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United People Against Crime (2000), “Changing the culture of criminality and corruption”,
Philippine Graphic, Vol. 11 No. 23, pp. 40-41.

Corresponding author
Dr Greg Bankoff can be contacted at: G.Bankoff@hull.ac.uk

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