Dynamics of Local Initiatives in Land Acquisition: The Case of General Santos City, the Philippines

General Santos City is one of a few local governments in the Philippines that has placed a priority on housing for the urban poor. While the case of General Santos is not a success story, the case is important in that it shows how a local government fulfilled the mandate of the Urban Development and Housing Act (UDHA) to provide land tenure to the urban poor. In this study, I explore the characteristics and traits of General Santos' land acquisition programs and mechanisms that underpinned this city's effort in providing credit and basic infrastructure for the urban poor and helping them to acquire their own land. The General Santos experience illustrates that a city will establish new partnerships with local NGOs when these partnerships are decisive for housing strategies. In this study, I show the pathways to the constructive partnership are circuitous emerging from past institutional structures rather than evolving from a top-down decision-making system to ones that collaborates with NGOs. In this study, I illustrate that after the UDHA made the city establish a coordinating council, a local NGO gained an active role within decision-making process of the city's relocation programs due to the lack of city expertise in mobilizing communities. The framework for coordination was not created overnight and did not come about after the city established this council. Rather, it grew out of a long history of interaction between NGOs and city offices. Furthermore, in this study I examine why the city adopted an innovative NGO model to carry out land acquisition programs. The NGO's land acquisition model illustrates what can be achieved by communities whether or not community initiatives are supported by local government. In addition, despite the failure of adopting the model, the city has learned the model through the process of experimenting with it and has itself grown to play a supplementary role in the NGO projects. Thesis Supervisor: Paul Smoke Title : Associate Professor of Political Economy and Planning