Why Naga holds the progressive halo – even after learning from Iloilo

By Antonio Calleja

Naga City has become the current darling of progressive local governance not because it suddenly discovered reform, but because it has managed to make reform look both institutional and alive. Many Philippine cities can point to projects, awards, or slogans. Naga can point to something harder to build: a durable political identity built around participation, accountability, and civic trust, now updated for a more digital and performance-oriented age. That is why it is drawing attention again. It is not merely a city with a good story from the Jesse Robredo years. It is a city trying to prove that the story still has administrative content in the present.

The foundation of that reputation is structural. Naga’s participatory tradition is not just a branding exercise or a mayor’s preferred tone. It is embedded in ordinances and institutions. Its Code of Good Governance and related empowerment architecture continue a city tradition of formally recognizing people’s participation in governance, while the city’s own public-facing materials still foreground the Naga City People’s Council and citizen engagement as part of how the city is governed. That matters because progressive governance becomes more credible when it is institutionalized rather than merely performed. A city earns a halo when the public can believe that participation will survive changes in mood, faction, or personality.

What gives Naga renewed energy is that it has not allowed that participatory legacy to fossilize. In 2025, the city institutionalized the “2028 Finish Lines” as its strategic development framework, aligning plans, programs, and resources around a clear set of outcome areas. Naga describes those outcome areas as spanning economic inclusion, environmental sustainability, mobility and order, health, education and well-being, heritage and identity, digital governance, good-governance innovation, and local government efficiency. That is important because it gives the city a language that progressive reform circles now reward: measurable outcomes, visible priorities, and a governance model that claims to organize the machinery of city hall around public ends rather than around patronage or ad hoc projectism.

Naga has also been careful to make governance legible to ordinary citizens. The MyNaga app is explicitly framed by the city as a tool for transparency, good governance, and citizen empowerment, giving residents service guides, emergency access, official updates, and a direct channel for reporting community issues. That may sound small beside larger infrastructure projects, but it is politically significant. Progressive governance today is often judged not only by what a city builds, but by whether residents can see, access, and interact with the state in ways that feel immediate and practical. Naga understands that the emotional grammar of reform now includes digital accessibility and visible feedback loops.

The city has also tried to give itself a cleaner integrity narrative. Executive Order No. 001, series of 2025, adopted a zero-tolerance policy against corruption and explicitly framed city governance around transparency, accountability, and ethical public service. On its own, an executive order does not prove a government is clean. But it does matter that Naga is trying to build an official position in which anti-corruption is not treated as an occasional scandal response but as part of routine governance language. When that is paired with participatory institutions and a development framework built around finish lines, Naga starts to look like one of the few Philippine cities attempting to link ethics, administration, and citizen legitimacy into one coherent model.

This is why recent external validation has been so useful to Naga’s image. In 2024 it won its fourth straight title as the Philippines’ most competitive component city and placed in the top three of all five competitiveness pillars: economic dynamism, government efficiency, infrastructure, resiliency, and innovation. It also received the Citizen-Led Policy Award at the Digital Democracy Awards for translating citizen feedback into policy. Those recognitions matter not because awards are everything, but because they reinforce the city’s preferred story: that Naga is not just idealistic, but capable; not just consultative, but administratively effective. That combination is rare enough in Philippine local governance to generate real attention.

And yet Naga’s current strength becomes even clearer when one remembers that it did not act as though it had nothing to learn. In March 2025, Leni Robredo, then running for mayor of Naga City, visited Iloilo City with councilors and department heads for a benchmarking activity on governance and urban development. Reporting on the visit said the delegation studied Iloilo’s urban practices, including the Iloilo River Esplanade, emergency-response systems, cleanliness, and other visible city-management initiatives. That was an intelligent move. Naga did not pretend to have a monopoly on good local governance. It recognized that Iloilo had become a serious reference point for public-space management, visible urban upgrading, and certain operational city systems.

That is the nuance often missed in the comparison. Naga’s halo does not rest on being better than every city at everything. It rests on being more complete in the current moment. Iloilo, especially under Jerry Treñas, built a powerful reputation for urban delivery. It became a city others could visit to study riverfront transformation, public-space revitalization, cleanliness, and visible execution. Naga’s willingness to learn from Iloilo should not be treated as a contradiction of its progressive standing. It should be treated as evidence of maturity. Strong cities borrow. Smart cities benchmark. The real question is which city today presents the more compelling full-spectrum governance model.

That is where Iloilo’s more recent troubles begin to matter. After Naga’s March 2025 visit, Iloilo City’s governance narrative became much messier. There were public questions over project costing after the city engineer’s office said a waiting shed estimate dropped from about P798,525 to P586,653 after review, while an overpass project earlier pegged at roughly P4.1 million was later said to be reducible to around P2.8 million to P2.9 million through revisions. There was also the December 2025 DSWD complaint over alleged ayuda kickbacks involving barangay officials and two reported city government employees, an issue that at the time remained an allegation under formal complaint rather than a final finding. None of this proves that Iloilo’s entire government is corrupt. But it does damage the city’s claim to strong ex ante controls and clean political optics.

The political climate in Iloilo has also become harder to reconcile with the progressive label. Councilor Sheen Marie Mabilog’s proposal for 80 percent real property tax relief failed twice to move beyond first reading because no councilor seconded it, despite reported tax increases of up to 300 percent after the city’s valuation adjustment. Vice Mayor Love Baronda’s election as National Movement of Young Legislators chair was not formally recognized by the Iloilo City Council even as Pavia, the Iloilo Provincial Board, and Antique’s Provincial Board passed congratulatory resolutions. A budget dispute later saw Baronda allege that politics shaped cuts to the Sangguniang Panlungsod’s proposed 2026 budget. None of those episodes alone proves authoritarianism in a strict sense. Together, however, they create a growing perception of majoritarian rigidity, selective openness, and a political environment less generous toward dissent than a genuinely progressive city should want to project.

That is why Naga now holds the stronger halo. It learned from Iloilo where Iloilo was strong: urban execution, public-space management, and visible city systems. But it currently looks more credible as a model of broad progressive governance because its public story is less burdened by factional noise and more anchored in participation, transparency, integrity language, and strategic coherence. Iloilo remains instructive. It still has real urban achievements that deserve serious respect but its governance image has narrowed. Naga’s, at least for now, has widened. In Philippine local governance, that is often what makes the difference between a city admired for projects and a city admired for politics, institutions, and public trust all at once.