key: cord-0959890-5md4j0oz
authors: Villar, Eula Bianca; Magnawa, John Pascual
title: Surveillance and pandemic governance in least‐ideal contexts: The Philippine case
date: 2022-02-07
journal: Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management
DOI: 10.1111/1468-5973.12394
sha: 74964c684308e5707ec1965d70227b8b5862e38e
doc_id: 959890
cord_uid: 5md4j0oz

This paper inquires how surveillance manifests in least‐ideal contexts (LICs), that is, countries with resource constraints, poor governance and proclivity for populism during COVID‐19, and its implications for crisis governance. Using the Philippines as a case, we advance three arguments. First, LICs can become spaces where inappropriate surveillance is undertaken. Second, liminal surveillance practices can become permanent policy fixtures in LICs. Finally, when a prevailing crisis approach of a government is perceived to be inconsistent with the needs of the public, it can lead to a self‐help system among various societal groups and actors. This self‐help system may not necessarily be aligned with the general direction of the national government. As a result, it can perpetuate a disjointed and maladaptive crisis governance approach, where main actors like national governments, and complementary actors like private sector firms, local government units and citizen organizations pursue goals independent of one another.

South Korea, and Singapore, which leveraged smart city technologies and employed aggressive contact tracing, mass testing, and in certain instances, mobile SIM-tracking to ensure compliance (Shaw et al., 2020; Sonn & Lee, 2020; Summers et al., 2020) .

While surveillance is acknowledged as a critical aspect of managing the pandemic, the benefits of surveillance are not applicable to all contexts. Indeed, the pandemic surfaced inequalities that are nested within regions and countries (Bailey et al., 2020; Finn & Kobayashi, 2020; Patel et al., 2020) . Boersma and Fonio (2017) highlight the unintended consequences of surveillance and challenge crisis scholars to critically engage surveillance practices in the field of crisis management. They argue that while surveillance can provide better 'operational pictures' in crisis environments, they also create tensions and negative implications that are rarely unpacked (Boersma & Fonio, 2017) . These include securitization of health and encroachment of personal privacy and civil liberties in the guise of control. This paper is a response to the challenge of unpacking surveillance in the context of crisis management. We specifically anchor this paper on the varied impacts of the pandemic on different countries, but more specifically against the least ideal contexts (LICs).

LICs are characterized by resource constraints, poor governance, and populist tendencies. Using the Philippines as a case, we inquire the following, 'what is the face of surveillance in LICs, and what are its implications for crisis governance?' Given that the pandemic is pushing both scholarly and policy discourse to revisit assumptions surrounding surveillance and crisis governance, it is important to emphasize the experience of LICs in managing COVID-19. This paper is structured as follows. Section 2 revisits pandemic governance literature in LICs and demonstrates the need to assess how resource constraints, poor governance and populist tendencies encourage maladaptive crisis approaches. Section 3 outlines the methodological strategy adopted and includes the contextual underpinnings of the Philippines as an LIC. Section 4 presents the key findings, while Section 5 lays out a critical analysis and discussion. Section 6 closes the paper with the conclusion, contributions, limitations and avenues for future work.

For over a year, COVID-19 laid bare various governmental approaches to pandemic management. The first few months were arguably experimental, as governments tried to make sense of the novelty of the virus. However, as more information became available, governments started to iterate on templates for action to address the surge in cases. These included different forms of surveillance.

Epidemiological surveillance is an expected measure to be undertaken in a pandemic (Holmes et al., 2018; Thomas, 2014) but COVID-19 also enabled other forms of surveillance to be exercised (Eck & Hatz, 2020; Wenger et al., 2020) . Examples include technological surveillance using contact tracing apps (Shaw et al., 2020; Sonn & Lee, 2020) , community-based surveillance through systematic community reporting especially in hard-to-reach regions (Ratnayake et al., 2020) , and security surveillance via increased uniformed presence (Chretien et al., 2007; Kalkman, 2020) .

Observations show that certain countries manage the pandemic better than others. Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea and New Zealand are among those often cited to have employed effective measures (Bremmer, 2020) . These instances demonstrate the best-case scenario, and it must be noted that these may also be predicated on certain parameters that include resource abundance, good governance (World Bank, 2020b) , and a political system that has a low proclivity for populism. This is not necessarily the case for countries that experience resource scarcity, poor governance and populist tendencies. Studies note that developing economies are disadvantaged in terms of harnessing science and technology needed to manage the pandemic, and that they do not necessarily have prior investments that enable the implementation of disease surveillance (Frerichs, 1991; Gerard et al., 2020) . It has also been observed that countries exhibiting poor governance tend to use surveillance as a policy window to legitimize controls that curtail civil liberties which can precede human rights violations (Eck & Hatz, 2020; Sekalala et al., 2020) .

Moreover, countries that exhibit populist tendencies fuel a divisive social narrative between model citizens versus the 'dangerous others' (Lasco & Curato, 2019; Lasco, 2020) . Through this narrative, populist political leaders are able to consolidate control, which may manifest in pandemic denial, conspiracy theories or in more extreme circumstances, heavy policing at the expense of a science and healthdriven response to the pandemic (Bayerlein et al., 2021; Cepaluni et al., 2021; McKee et al., 2020) .

The combination of the three characteristics-resource scarcity, poor governance and populist tendencies-make for the least ideal scenarios in managing the pandemic. We argue that the cooccurrence of these characteristics is a necessary condition that defines LICs, as opposed to countries that only exhibit one of the characteristics. For example, the United States, a resource-abundant country, resorted to a populist narrative under the leadership of Trump (Lasco, 2020) , but was able to effectively rollout the vaccine plan in the transition period from Trump to Biden (Gerber & Gail, 2021) . Meanwhile, despite their resource constraints, low-to middleincome countries like Vietnam, Bhutan, Mongolia and Thailand managed to keep their cases down through early preventive action (Babu et al., 2020; Dorji, 2020; Erkhembayar et al., 2020; Kaweenuttayanon et al., 2021; Van Nguyen et al., 2020) .

Taking the perspective of LICs, where resource scarcity, poor governance and populist tendencies are present, helps provide a nuanced understanding of pandemic governance. In these conditions, countries find it more difficult to adopt appropriate public health policy interventions (Kaufmann, 2020) . Moreover, it has also been observed that such contexts could use COVID-19 as a precedent to employ surveillance measures, which may be legitimized as policy (Akbari, 2021) . Such is the case in the Philippines, which imposed the longest lockdown, and also managed to enact the anti-terror law amidst the pandemic (Amit et al., 2020a (Amit et al., , 2020b Hapal, 2021; Joaquin & Biana, 2020) . Unpacking how governments in LICs employ surveillance policies helps explain the prevalence of certain governance practices. Moreover, seeing the prevailing dynamics of managing the pandemic in LICs informs our view that while a crisis like the global pandemic has a blanket effect on almost all aspects of the society, its impacts will be differentiated as a result of certain parameters. Therefore, the coping mechanisms of the country as a whole, will be different.

This paper uses case narrative (Sonday et al., 2020; Webster, 2007) to provide a critical analysis of how surveillance is exercised in the Philippines as an example of an LIC: a lower-middle income, resourceconstrained, developing country, mired in corruption as well as populist government. The case narrative is built using publicly available documents that include laws, presidential reports to the joint congressional oversight committees, local and national news reports and government press releases that became pertinent during the pandemic. These allow us to build a chronological timeline of the Philippine response to COVID-19, from March 2020 to January 2021.

We follow a three-step process in building the narrative. First, we map the multisectoral crisis landscape in the Philippines, allowing us to track the relevant actors that play a role in systematically responding to COVID-19. Second, we track the policy actions of the national government, specifically on surveillance and juxtapose it with the actual status of the COVID-19 cases and other pertinent events occurring during the pandemic. Third, we capture the emergent actions of complementary actors (CAs) (i.e., actors beyond the national government, including local government units, private actors and civil society organizations). Consequently, this allows us to surface the overall dynamics of crisis governance in the country.

The Philippines is an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia that embodies the characteristics that define an LIC: a. Resource Constraint. The World Bank categorizes the country as a 'low middle-income country' (World Bank, 2020a) . Prepandemic, 17 million Filipinos lived below the poverty line, whose per capita income is insufficient to meet their basic food and nonfood needs (Philippine Statistics Authority, 2019). With the pandemic, the World Bank projects that 2.7 million more Filipinos will sink into poverty (De Vera, 2020) . In terms of resource capacity to address a pandemic, the country had limited bed capacity prepandemic (German et al., 2018) , and one doctor for every 33,000 Filipinos (Abalos et al., 2020) . Before c. Rising Populism. The prevailing rhetoric of the current Duterte administration is militant in nature, characterized by policies anchored on heavy policing which has laid down a precedent for excessive vigilantism and abusive police behaviour (Curato, 2017) . The populist political style of Duterte (Teehankee, 2021) persists in his administration's pandemic approach, that is, 'medical populism' (Lasco, 2020) . This pandemic populism is largely hinged on state surveillance measures (Amit et al., 2020a) , with heavy policing to create a clear depiction of the 'perpetual enemies of health and order' as embodied by the pasaway, those who go against the hard measures of control to curb COVID-19 (Hapal, 2021) . This has also led to violations of civil liberties and worsening cases of violence and impunity (Agojo, 2021) , mostly at the expense of vulnerable communities (Bekema, 2021) . With a team comprised heavily of police and military personnel, the national government declared an 'ECQ' which severely restricted the movement of the population. The ECQ was initially applied in Luzon, the centre of political and economic power. Under ECQ, all nonessential businesses were mandated to close, public transportation was restricted, and curfews were imposed. The government also highlighted the 'heightened presence of uniformed personnel to enforce community quarantine protocols' (IATF, 2020). Intercity travel was prohibited and checkpoints were established to limit the movement of people, stranding thousands of individuals in Metro Manila. Many local governments also established an authorization system, where only a single individual from each household was allowed to travel outside the residence for activities such as going to the market or pharmacy.

The ECQ was intended to last for only 14 days but was extended twice. During this phase, the Bayanihan to Heal As One Act (2020) During this phase, national government anchored its policy approach to the pandemic on the Bayanihan Act as a legal instrument. This was enacted through heavy policing that, while falling short on other provisions, would address the more immediate needs in the health sector, including increased testing capacity, quarantine and isolation centres, medical equipment and an integrated data system to effectively undertake epidemiological and technological surveillance systems. While the Bayanihan Act allowed the release of funds to address the resource constraints of the country, many of these constraints were addressed and funded by the CAs (Lopez, 2020) . Another important observation from this phase is that the surveillance system used by the national government relied on security surveillance and limited epidemiological or technological surveillance. In contrast, CAs self-organized to undertake technology, community-based and epidemiological surveillance. As early as Phase 2, a fragmented approach to COVID-19 started to manifest with critical resources deployed primarily by CAs, while the national government attempted to control the situation with tighter security policies.

The number of COVID-19 cases peaked during this phase, while, ironically, the government tried to find a path towards GCQ.

Hospitals were packed and health practitioners called for a return to stricter quarantine measures, citing that the health sector is burned out and hospitals are at full capacity. In August, it was estimated that 5000 health practitioners contracted COVID-19 while approximately 39 front-liners succumbed to the disease (Tomacruz, 2020) . Policymakers deliberated a return to ECQ, and the discussions were framed around balancing health and economic interests. Health practitioners called for a change in approach from a 'military, fascist measures' to 'public health, pro-people response. (Luna, 2020) . The national government responded to this call by reverting the quarantine status of high-risk areas in the country from GCQ to MECQ.

The Bayanihan Act was extended, labelled Bayanihan 2 Act, resulting in additional financial resources to support the economy. surveillance. Note, also, that one of the manifestations of this expanding state surveillance is the prevalent red-tagging campaign of the PNP and the AFP on individuals who actively support human rights advocacies, specifically targeting students (Talabong, 2020) .

From October 14 to 27, the Philippine Red Cross suspended COVID-19 testing due to the failure of PhilHealth to settle their existing debt. This reduced the national testing capacity by approximately 30% (Santos & Limpot, 2020) . Mired by allegations of mismanagement, the national government continued its crisis approach according to the tone set in previous phases. Meanwhile, CAs started to take more independent initiatives in managing the pandemic within their respective jurisdictions.

For example, some local governments exercised bricolage in sourcing out vaccines, creating quarantine facilities, community-based surveillance and contact tracing, as well as leveraging technology to curb the COVID-19 cases (Rappler, 2021) . Meanwhile, grassroots and nongovernment organizations continued to deliver necessary resources to affected communities.

4.6 | Phase 5: The looming permanence of the MGCQ and the self-help system of CAs-December 2020 to January 2021

Most of the Philippines had been placed in MGCQ, and Filipinos started to settle in with the protocols, including curfews and regular provision of health and personal data. Domestic travels resumed, and the learning curve of private actors in living with MGCQ were starting to be normalized. In December 2020, many developed countries expedited the emergency process for approval of newly developed COVID-19 vaccines. In the Philippines, no clear national government strategy was evident regarding the procurement and phased deployment of the vaccine.

A whistleblower also announced that COVID-19 vaccines were administered to select few members of the military, sans the approval of the National Food and Drug Administration (Limpot, 2020) . Amid criticisms from the public and lawmakers, the national government defended the unauthorized inoculation and urged Filipinos to 'just accept that it is important [that] soldiers are safe from COVID so they can do their jobs', while the President admitted on national media that many in his social circle were inoculated using Chinesedeveloped vaccine, Sinopharm (Punzalan, 2020) .

The prevailing concerns in this phase were vaccine procurement and a clear inoculation strategy. To this end, CAs took bolder steps in self-organizing and finding ways to get hold of vaccine supplies. In many ways, this phase became revelatory of the self-help system that private actors and local governments undertook as a way of coping with the shortcomings of the national government. Large corporations and local governments started to systematically establish agreements with vaccine distributors (Rappler, 2021) . The national government later announced that cities could do this if they had the financial resources, while those without would have to settle with what the national government procures.

The findings above demonstrate various aspects of what surveillance could look like in an LIC. We acknowledge that surveillance is a critical component in managing the COVID-19 crisis, and best-case scenarios manifest in advanced economies that employ surveillance strategies which are proportional to the need of managing COVID-19 (Renda & Castro, 2020; Robert, 2020; Shaw et al., 2020) . However, in LICs like the Philippines, surveillance practices may be exercised disproportionately without necessarily addressing the needs of society. As demonstrated above, the national government relied heavily on state security surveillance, leaving CAs to fill in the gaps in pandemic management. These observations surface three points of analysis in relation to surveillance: a. LICs become spaces of inappropriate surveillance policies during crisis One of the debates in pandemic governance is the extent to which surveillance, especially state-controlled movements, threaten civil liberties and human rights. Celermajer and Nassar (2020) argue that one way to resolve this is to draw on the concept of 'appropriateness' where the justification is grounded on achieving the collective well-being of the society. They argue further that appropriateness rests on 'infrastructure and history of experience of cooperative decision-making' and 'trust in institutions' (Celermajer & Nassar, 2020) . As demonstrated by the Philippine case, these circumstances tend to be absent in LICs. Moreover, restrictive security surveillance practiced in the Philippines do not necessarily lead to better social, political, and economic health (Agojo, 2021; Bekema, 2021 (Boersma, 2013) . In the Philippines, the crisis opened a policy window for the national government to strengthen its militaristic and police-driven surveillance. Note that while the Philippines adopted various forms of community quarantines, it never really exited the state of lockdown throughout the crisis.

This contrasts with the recommended approach of rolling, instead of 'sustained', lockdowns for low-income and middle-income economies (Chowdhury et al., 2020) .

In LICs, resource constraints are used to justify surveillance as a crisis management tool. For instance, the Bayanihan Act granted the national government access to emergency funds intended to mobilize COVID-19 response and relief. Despite this, Duterte enjoined his government to find more funding because the money was 'not enough'-in a televised address, he tasked his Secretary of Finance to generate funding, 'steal, borrow, I don't care. Produce the money' (Gregorio, 2020) . Compounded with populist tendencies, national governments may use the crisis to strengthen societal control by VILLAR AND MAGNAWA | 27 means of a bifurcated narrative of model versus pasaway citizens.

Prepandemic, Duterte's brand of leadership was known to favour the use of punishment and violence in the guise of reinforcing discipline (Curato, 2017) . This continued to be the preferred policy approach during the pandemic (Agojo, 2021; Hapal, 2021) .

Heightened security surveillance was initially considered liminal while the government tried to get hold of other resources necessary to manage COVID-19. Over time, however, security surveillance only strengthened while CAs began to enact other forms of surveillance policies necessary to manage COVID-19. Security surveillance also became the dominant policy approach of the government, and this extended to other crises that the government is facing (e.g., terrorism). This was legitimized by the passing of the Anti-Terror Law and increases doubt as to its appropriateness given that science-and/or technology-based approach might be more effective for specific types of crisis (e.g., climate crisis, pandemic).

On a related note, Boin, Ekengren et al. (2020) argue that one of the main challenges that policymakers face in creeping crises like the pandemic is its potential to undermine the legitimacy of public institutions. The sudden outburst of a creeping crisis can be interpreted as 'willing ignorance on the part of public institutions that were designed to protect citizens', and can subsequently lead to their delegitimization (Boin, Ekengren et al., 2020) . We opine that one way to preserve legitimacy is by means of control, with the intention of striking a fine balance between the care and control elements of surveillance (Boersma & Fonio, 2017; Finn et al., 2017) . In LICs, however, such control may be excessively done at the expense of care, as demonstrated by the Philippine case. This may be counterproductive for the national government, in that instead of gaining legitimacy regarding their role in managing the pandemic, they only spur discontent from CAs, which in turn find ways to exercise selforganization (see next point). c. Self-help system as a form of crisis governance occurs in LICs Finally, we see the emergence of a self-help system among CAs.

During the early stages of the crisis, CAs augmented the resource constraints of the national government through bricolage of available resources. Ideally, one would expect a collaborative partnership among the actors to enable an effective and seamless deployment of resources (Moynihan, 2009 ). In the Philippine case, this seemed to be the path that CAs initially wanted to pursue. Indeed, as seen across all phases, CAs tried to augment limited government resources especially during crucial moments in Phases 1 and 2. Instead, the government only started to integrate the resources of the CAs (e.g., adoption of StaySafe.ph) in Phase 3. The lapse in time between phases pushed CAs to pursue their own means of coping with the crisis which may not be aligned with the crisis approach of the national government. The propensity of CAs to undertake selfhelp system is further reinforced by corollary events that include mismanagement of already scarce resources, corruption, and scandals. As a result, LICs like the Philippines perpetuate an uncoordinated system of crisis governance where, on the one hand, the government pursues a crisis approach that is ineffective in addressing the needs of its constituents, and on the other, various CAs pursue a self-help system to address the government's shortcomings. We link this with the analysis of Boin (2009) regarding the task of crisis leaders to 'offer credible answers' in creeping crises. If policymakers fall short in providing a convincing logic to explain the crisis, they fail to rally the support of their constituents (Boin, 2009 ). This is a very likely scenario in LICs as demonstrated by the Philippine case, which enabled self-organization as a leadership configuration (Buchanan & Hällgren, 2019 ) that can likely undermine the capacity of public leaders to exercise focused leadership. The end result is the prevalence of two crisis approaches from two groups, that is, main actors and CAs, that conflict (instead of mutually reinforce) with one another.

This paper provides a closer look at how LICs navigate the pandemic.

The pandemic surfaced the need for surveillance practices and we expect that future crises might require similar controls. As hazards become more complex, the kind of crisis policies necessary to manage them will inevitably require good surveillance practices (Blondin & Boin, 2020; Boin et al., 2014 ). Yet despite the positive implications of surveillance in the practice of crisis management, it is also crucial to unpack its unitended (and likely negative) consequences (Boersma & Fonio, 2017) . To this end, crisis scholars problematize the 'Janusfaced' nature of surveillance in crisis (Finn et al., 2017) , and this paper demonstrates how the dark side of surveillance can manifest in LICs.

By looking at the perspective of LICs, we demonstrate that prescribed policy approaches to address a crisis which has transboundary effects, can take a different, often contentious, face. While best-case examples show ideal contexts where surveillance function as intended, the opposite is true for LICs. The case of LICs encourages the misuse of surveillance which, in turn, may be formalized through legal instruments. Consequently, LICs also allow a self-help governance system among CAs to emerge. Optimistically, CAs will consolidate at the earliest phase and pursue a collaborative crisis governance aligned with the approach of the national government.

Pessimistically, they may create a divergent self-help system that could unintentionally deepen societal inequities due to differentiated access to resources. This paper is not without limitations. We emphasized the need to take the perspective of LICs to highlight the differentiated impacts of COVID-19 on different countries. We characterize LICs as those that jointly exhibit resource constraint, poor governance systems, and proclivity to populism. However, we acknowledge that there might be other parameters that define LICs. Future research should address this gap to allow for a controlled comparison of crisis management in ideal contexts vis-a-vis LICs. Future research should further investigate the dynamics of a self-help system among CAs and the extent that this creates adaptive versus maladaptive crisis governance structures.

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The authors are grateful for the valuable comments of the anonymous reviewers in the earlier versions of this work, as well as the editorial guidance of Kees Boersma, Monika Buescher, and Chiara

Fonio. The authors did not receive funding for the undertaking of this study.

The author has provided the required data availability statement, and if applicable, included functional and accurate links to said data therein ORCID Eula Bianca Villar https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5489-7173