We Are Not Starting From Scratch: A Note on Continuity, Constraint, and National Learning By Karl Garcia
The Philippines is often spoken about as if it is perpetually beginning—resetting with every administration, rediscovering problems it has already named, relearning lessons already paid for in time, money, and sometimes lives. That framing is comforting in its simplicity, but it is also misleading.
We are not starting from scratch.
We are, instead, operating within a long accumulation of experience—policy experiments, institutional reforms, partial successes, repeated failures, and adaptive workarounds. The country is not a blank slate. It is a layered system of memory, some of it formal in law and planning documents, much of it informal in practice and lived governance.
To ignore this is to misdiagnose the problem.
The Philippines does not suffer primarily from a lack of knowledge. It suffers from uneven absorption of knowledge into durable systems. Lessons are learned, but not always retained. Policies are written, but not always institutionalized. Innovations emerge, but are often not scaled or protected from political turnover, bureaucratic fragmentation, or resource constraints.
And yet, despite this, the system moves. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes unevenly. But it moves.
This is important to acknowledge because it reframes what reform actually requires. The task is not simply to “introduce new ideas,” but to connect ideas across time—to build continuity where discontinuity has been the norm. It is to strengthen institutional memory, align incentives with execution, and reduce the gap between policy design and operational reality.
We also operate under constraints that are not entirely self-inflicted. Geography shapes logistics. Climate intensifies vulnerability. Global shocks ripple through domestic systems. Strategic competition in surrounding seas adds pressure that no single policy cycle can fully neutralize. These are not excuses; they are conditions.
But conditions are not destinies.
What is self-inflicted—and therefore most within our control—is the tendency to treat governance as episodic rather than cumulative. Each cycle risks discarding the partial gains of the previous one in favor of reinvention. In doing so, we lose compounding effects that are essential for national development.
If there is a quiet argument embedded here, it is this: progress is less about dramatic departures and more about disciplined accumulation. Institutions matter not because they are perfect, but because they allow societies to remember what works long enough to improve upon it.
This is also why writing, documentation, and even imperfect analysis matter. Ideas do not need to be final to be useful. They need to be transmissible. They need to survive contact with future readers—policy makers, students, analysts—who will inevitably operate under different constraints but may still face familiar problems.
If any of this survives revision, critique, or adaptation by those who come after, then it has done its work.
The hope is not that future decision-makers inherit certainty. It is that they inherit continuity.
And from continuity, improvement becomes possible.
The Society of Honor by Joe America 
As I look at it, there are several factors that contribute to the slow-pace and start/stop jerkiness of progress in the Philippines.
Decision-making certainty can be improved by giving a major project prominence over time, politics, and laws. Certain laws should be subordinated to projects of national importance. Get politics, budgets, land use and rights of way, and LGUs out of the way.
Thanks Joe, this sums up and articulated my past long form articles and the one I scheduled next. Which I myself find redundant so I will replace it.
I note that younger, tech savvy oligarch family members are moving into key management roles. This is good I think.
https://bilyonaryo.com/2026/04/21/next-gen-takeover-jaime-alfonso-named-globe-vice-chair-mariana-joins-board/technology/
Yes I think it is good too.
But the one about a Lopez scoonand Razon is creating a Board room battle
battle for leadership, lopez vs lopez much like the marcoses with imee marcos contradicing her brother, but unlike the lopezes, imee can never take over the presidency.
methink, if the lopezes dont settle their differences and go to court, lawyers will gain the most, financially! maybe, the lopezes will have arm wrestling na lang, cheaper that way: to the winner the spoils.
whereas polong duterte is up to his old trick again, challenged madriaga, sara’s ex bagman, for a bout of boxing. and surprisingly enough, madriaga accepted the challenge. I am thinking tuloy na maybe, ex gen torre may have to give up his coveted boxing belt to the winner of the polong duterte vs madriaga bout.
TACO trump always chickens out to PACO
oh, I loved battles! blond vs brunette, I did not mean vice ganda who is blond these days, haha.
anyhow, if I have to bring down the abstract, I would give it local context. and we could well be starting from chicken scratch, though we rarely starts from scratch, coz our scratching has long been thought of, just did not have the opportunity to bring it up, conditions were uberly hostile then. now, not so. what was started as sly scratch is finally gaining momentum and maybe imploding big time. but enough riddle!
me talking about one of the grandest family of all, the embattled dutertes. the family is being consumed from the inside thanks to their own doings: the patriarch cannot escape the hague, the daughter is facing impeachment, and her once trusted bagman is witness against her. and now, she will be leaving the country and approved to be gone for 22 days, before impeachment could start. will she back, is everyone’s guess! but we hope she’ll be back.
her nemesis, trillanes, has been scratching for so long, now his scratchings are being given time of day! the docus he has been keeping, the bank records of sara duterte, once ridiculed and laughed at loudly, are back in favor, have the potential to pin down sara’s unexplained wealth.
maybe sebastian duterte will challenged trillanes to a boxing bout too, haha. instead of sebastian 38 to challenge madriaga 58, trillanes is younger and in better physical shape than madriaga. not that I am being boxing promoter.
Haha one time Zubiri reninded everyine that he is a judo blackbelt when Sen Tri and him crossed. I think as long as The Dutertes won’t send Paquiao if they rub elbows again d na mismatch.
Bato is also a big man, he pulled Robin away from Villanueva once, but where is he?
when the going gets tough, the tough gets going! gone hiding bato is. self imposed. the great absentee has not been to work since november 2025, been stripped of his committee memberships too, his request to stay in the luxurious senate mansion in baguio was denied. but still collecting his regular pay, as well as enjoying perks and benefits like use of govt car. and if he dies of boredom from lack of meaningful work and developed brainrot due to lack of interaction, he’ll probly gets free state funeral too.
He is allocated a plot in Libingan ng mga bayani.
much I wanted to say congratulations for being vice chair, I see potential conflict arising. jaime alfonso zobel is sharing vice chairmanship with a singaporean telecom rep. two of them in that chair, I am reminded of the atlassian tech group, there were two directors and very good friends they were too until the two had a fallout, and one was ejected: voted to vamoosh!
still, it is good to see younger zobels joining the business.
In the extreme, if a hole is exposed the nepo baby or dysfunctionsl family feud card will be used again as in my other comnent about Lopez family.
Get ABS-CBN drama producers on it. 🙂
teleserye coming up!
Karl, I took the shameless liberty of adding a title picture to your article as I think it deserved one. Just a tip on how to generate such pictures: I went into Claude, pasted in the entire article text and asked it to make a Bing Image Generator prompt for the topic, then went to Bing and toyed around with different models (it has 3) or went back to Claude and asked for tweaks (more positive please, darker, brigher etc.) until the picture came out that I liked.
I think in general our articles get more engagement if they have title pictures.
This is inserted as the “feature image” in the right column of the post edit feature. I set mine to a 1200px width.
Many thanks, Irineo and Joe.
Re national learning: we had a surge in visitors as I actively promoted the OPM article, then Coachella, then the Detroit article. This surge has tipped off again.
Possibly the the music crowd read some of our stuff and thought “What is that?” and the technocratic crowd read our stuff and thought “Who are THEY?”.
Ok maybe we don’t realize that the growth of national learning is taking place elsewhere, or is it simply too many spaces that don’t know how to talk to one another?
There was this X account that correctly analyzed the issues BPO might get soon. There is Behind Asia FB page who are right on many economic matters. There are blogs like d0ctrine about traffic policies that are pretty sensible.
And there is Heydarian who has some good ideas but is a bit too full of himself to dialog.