Local autonomy has become an increasingly valued feature of local government

in recent decades in different part of the globe. On the other hand, it creates
decentralization of local government to central government aiming to improve and bring
the necessary services closer to citizens and it has been a general trend. In the Philippine
setting, Regional autonomy has to be pursue as a means of granting the Cordillera
peoples greater freedom to manage their internal affairs and their region’s resources. This
does not mean secession. The widespread concern shown by our officials for the
proposed Bangsamoro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao. This is the home of
some 1.2 million indigenous peoples generally known to lowlanders as Igorots although
they actually belong to several ethnolinguistic groups. The Cordilleras people are well
known to the rest of the country for their distinctive mountain culture. They now live in the
provinces of Abra, Apayao, Benguet, Ifugao, Kalinga, and Mountain Province, and the
city of Baguio. The provinces and city which vote in a plebiscite for the establishment of
the autonomous region would form the ARC. The organization of ARC in the far north of
the country could serve as model for other regions of the country should a federal system
of government be set up for the country under a new Constitution. There will be the other
region in the far south – the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region, for which a law has also
been filed in Congress. In between these two regions will be several other possible
autonomous regions – Northern Luzon’s Ilocano provinces, Central Luzon, Metro Manila,
Southern Luzon, Bicol, Western, Central, and Eastern Visayas, Northern and Southern
Mindanao. These will have to await the approval and ratification of a new Constitution. In
the meantime, we can watch the development and growth of ARC and Bangsamoro, learn
from their problems and trials, to help in the formation and development of the other
proposed regions of the country. Local autonomy has become one of the key features of
any local government system in the past few decades. On the other hand,
decentralization reforms devolving political power and responsibilities towards levels of
government closer to the citizens have silently been sweeping the globe since the 1980s.
This happens through growing involvement of citizens in the political process, an increase
in the accountability of the decisions, the improvement of economic efficiency, the
encouragement of healthy local competition/cross-functional coordination, the support in
policy experimentation, and the protection of macroeconomic and political stability. For
example, the Council of Europe adopted in 1985 the European Charter of Local Self-
Government” an international legal instrument ensuring the protection, evaluation and
promotion of decentralization and local autonomy principles, which entails the existence
of local authorities endowed with democratically constituted decision-making bodies and
possessing a wide degree of autonomy with regard to their responsibilities, the ways and
means by which those responsibilities are exercised and the resources required for their
fulfilment. A recurrent theme in the fields of local government, democracy,
decentralization and urban studies are the nature of the local-central governments’
relations and the extent to which local governments have autonomy to decide on their
political system, on local policies, and on goods and services they offer. According to
some political scientist, it is important to be concerned about local autonomy because it
is the necessary condition for local representatives to have the ability to meet citizens’
demands, needs and conditions. In this perspective the higher the degree of autonomy
they enjoy, the greater their responsibility, responsiveness, accountability and it may also
increase policy diversity and innovation. In addition, through its possible impact on
political interest, leadership development and citizen democratic education at the local
level, it may act as a countervailing power regarding the higher levels of government. Of
course these governance values should be counterbalanced by the arguments of
legitimate national interests and equity in local public choice. Finally, it may enable
economic efficiency distribution of public services, which contributes to legitimize local
government. Using the term autonomy to describe the ability of local governments to
make decisions about the services it delivers without interference from the center
government. Autonomy is the legally entrenched power of communities to exercise public
policy functions of a legislative, executive and/or judicial type independently of other
sources of authority in the state, but subject to the overall legal order of the state.
Autonomy as a strategy of preventing and settling self-determination conflicts is based on
the recognition of group-specific concerns alongside and on par with concerns of
individuals and the state. It is equally based on accepting that to endow an ethnic group
with legislative, executive, and judicial powers to address these concerns effectively will
contribute to individual, group, and state security, and thus to preventing the disruption of
the territorial and/or social integrity of a given country. In practice, autonomy
arrangements incorporate executive, legislative, and judicial powers to varying degrees.
In cases where it is used as an instrument for self-determination conflict prevention and
settlement, autonomy ideally includes such a mix of the three that enables the ethnic
group in question to regulate independently the affairs central to the concerns of its
members, which are normally easily identifiable as they manifest themselves in concrete
claims. However, as autonomy falls short of full sovereignty, this happens within the
broader constitutional and legislative framework of the minority’s host country and under
the supervision of a central government or similar agencies ensuring the compliance of
all actions of the autonomous institutions with the regulations set up for the operation of
autonomy. To ensure that local governments have the capacity to be autonomous, each
local government unit is empowered to create its own sources of revenues and to levy
taxes, fees and charges. They are mandated to have share in the national taxes. They
are also entitled to an equitable hare in the proceeds of the utilization and development
of the national wealth. The local government units that enjoy autonomy are the provinces,
cities, municipalities and barangays. The provinces comprise of cities and municipalities,
while the latter comprise of barangays. In the context of a nation state comprised of both
a national government and several local government units, local government autonomy
may give rise to certain disadvantages, such as conflicting regulation, overlapping
regulation, excessive regulation and excessive taxation.