State versus Indigenous Peoples’ Rights: Comparative Analysis of Stable System Parameters, Policy Constraints and the Process of Delegitimation

Abstract

One of the challenges in understanding politics and public policy is to elucidate the interactions between the policy process and a broader context. In the scholarship on the advocacy coalition framework, this broader context is described as a set of variables called relatively stable parameters and is one of the most understudied areas within the framework. This paper aims to contribute to this area of scholarship by using the case of the indigenous peoples’ rights policy in the Philippines to illustrate the mechanisms that explain how relatively stable parameters are framed and used by political actors to constrain policy change and implementation. In particular, it illustrates that while the minority coalition used incremental shifts in the constitution to pass the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act, the dominant opposing coalition has activated and used relatively stable parameters associated with the Regalian Doctrine to restrict the formulation, prorogate the enactment, and weaken the implementation of the said policy. There were three interrelated mechanisms of constraint employed by the dominant opposing coalition, all of which relate to delegitimation of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Act and its implementing agency.