MY BARANGAY* CALLS

9 February 2026

I am a single woman entrepreneur in my 50s.  I have a workshop that makes ethnic jewellery from beads and semi-precious stones, which I then sell through a small outlet in Makati. Some time ago, I invested my savings in a fully furnished apartment that I currently lease out. This is my nest egg for my retirement. With few family relations, I worry about sickness in old age.

One of my recent tenants was a young, good-looking girl who told me she and her boyfriend had decided to live together and were looking for a flat in a good neighbourhood where my apartment-to-let was located. I never met her boyfriend, but both signed the lease, and the boyfriend sent a cheque for a substantial advance and a two-month deposit.

Because I was busy at work, I relied on my housekeeper and my broker to help liaise with the tenants and manage the property. A few months later, however, I learned that my tenant and her boyfriend had separated: he left, and she asked her mother to join her instead. Thereafter, the mother handled all the liaison work with us. I didn’t know the reason for this separation, but since it didn’t seem to affect the tenancy agreement, I thought I shouldn't meddle in their private lives.

However, unbeknownst to me and in direct contravention of the condominium building's house rules, as confirmed in the lease agreement, she brought in five pet cats. The rules allowed only two small pets with the landlord's written permission.  In another breach of contract, neighbours began complaining about hallway traffic and loud discussions coming from the unit.  It appeared she was conducting business presentations, even though the contract expressly stipulated that the flat was to be used only for residential purposes.

I was therefore very pleased when her mother notified my helper and my broker that they wanted to move out -- I waived the penalty clause to further encourage them.  

However, during turnover, we found the flat in complete disarray.  It was very dirty, even though it should have been professionally cleaned. There were pockmarks on the furniture, scratches on doors, sofas, and dining chairs, a cracked mirror, and stains on the mattress.  A large kitchen leak destroyed the woodwork underneath, and the marble countertop was discoloured by abrasive chemicals. Again, the contract stipulated that any damage beyond wear and tear would be charged to the tenant.  Unexpectedly, we were unable to persuade the mother and daughter to agree, as they claimed they had never been given a copy of the notarised contract.  They demanded the return of their deposit in full and walked out. 

Prospective lessees couldn’t occupy the property until it was restored to its former tenantable condition. We therefore engaged contractors to do the necessary cleaning and repairs, deducting the costs from the deposit. However, when these were presented to the tenant and her mother, along with a cheque for the balance, they declined our offer. Instead, we had an argument during which the mother resorted to name-calling: I stopped talking to them. They then threatened to take me to court.

A couple of weeks later, I received a summons from the Punong Barangay. The tenant filed a case against me for refusing to return her deposit. Under threat of contempt of court, I was required to personally appear before the Barangay. I spent hours collating photos of damages, receipts of repair works, copies of the lease contract, inventory checklists, and more. Additionally, I wrote a lengthy letter addressed to the Punong Barangay explaining my side.

I read that the purpose of the proceedings was mediation. I didn’t know whether this was something I was legally required to follow.  Shouldn’t the Barangay first familiarise itself with the case before giving me a summons I couldn’t refuse? One review of the case would see the obvious—that there was no case!

What if I didn’t want mediation? To me, it was a waste of my time. As a matter of principle, I had already decided not to return one centavo more than the amount written on the cheque. I valued honesty and fairness and believed that, if the tenant and her mother could get away with what they were trying to do, they would do it to someone else next time.

It was the fear of being held in contempt of court that made me skip work to attend the Barangay meeting. I submitted my documents and, in turn, requested to see the allegations against me.  The Barangay mediator then showed me a short, handwritten note, accusing me of cheating the tenant by refusing to return her deposit.  She simply wanted her money back.

The mediator proceeded to ask me to compromise, but I said I was not willing to settle.  Thereafter, another meeting was scheduled.  It seemed there would be in total three of such meetings until we reached a mutual agreement.

At our second meeting, the complainant did not show up. After 45 minutes of waiting, the mediator allowed me to leave.  It seemed that there was, after all, no such “contempt of court” for no-shows. The Barangay was not authorised to do this, but decided it was the only way they could ensure the defendant would answer the summons.

I was given a day’s notice for our third and supposedly final meeting -- I let out a sigh of relief. If no settlement was reached, it would be the end of the Barangay’s intervention—complainant and defendant could then go to the small claims court if they so wished.

The third meeting was full of confrontations and acrimonious recriminations between the tenant’s mother and my helper, who took charge of the repair work. On my part, I pointed out that the mediators only needed to read the documents I had provided. But none of the changing mediators had bothered to read any of the evidence -- in fact, their office had since misplaced them, as they were immaterial to the case.  That was when I learned that the Barangay was not supposed to pass judgment. Instead, its role was simply to provide a proper venue, to moderate, and to act as impartial listeners. Thus, they were only concerned that the right procedures were kept.

I was aghast!  If just anyone could lodge a complaint against anyone else and the two parties were required to meet, was the government not concerned about the possible anxieties and wasted time it would cause for everyone involved? What about the time and effort of the Barangay staff?  Even with different mediators, each of our meetings ran the whole morning!  There were late arrivals, staff unavailability or limited availability, and so on.

I finally stood up to go as I was feeling overwhelmed, whereupon the mediator asked what our decision was. The mother initially offered to forgo a small portion of their claim, then half the amount, and finally asked me for my compromise offer. My response was "nothing."

At this point, the mediator intoned that she was endorsing our case to a “higher body” and would contact us regarding the next hearing schedule. Again, I was shocked! I had thought there would only be three mediation meetings. But I said, “Fine, I will wait for the next summons”. The mother at last angrily called after me that she would accept the cheque after all. I said again, “Fine,” and marched out of the room while my helper waited for the signed one-page acceptance slip.

I was still furious as I found my way home. I kept asking myself why we didn’t have a system to screen cases and dismiss those filed solely for harassment. The next day, I again took time to see what would have happened if the tenant and her mother had not accepted the original cheque. After all, they had nothing to lose except their time, and they didn’t seem to value it. For me, I incurred significant opportunity costs each time I missed work. Furthermore, I felt trapped in a cycle of constant repetition.

It was difficult to get through to the Punong Barangay. The numbers listed on their letterhead were not working, and the mediators’ mobile phones were not answering or were constantly busy. Finally, I got a sympathetic ear who said that the “higher body” referred to was the Lupong Barangay.*** There, the complainant and defendant would again hold three meetings, now in front of some 15 appointed Barangay residents in attendance. What would happen if the issue was still not resolved after those meetings? I was advised that my best course of action would be to settle to prevent the case from escalating further. That, I was summarily told, was what most people did.

My parting thoughts:  the world is full of tenants from hell and other dishonest people who manipulate situations to their advantage.  We do need protection from them as they try to exploit systemic inefficiencies and loopholes. But even when it tries, our government is weak at generating systems that genuinely protect its citizens' rights.  We are not good at creating such mechanisms because many of our policies are poorly thought out.  Is this a cultural trait?  

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*Barangay:  Smallest Filipino political unit; local village 

** Punong Barangay:  Barangay captain 

*** Lupong Barangay:  Higher barangay board

Commentary

The story above is not so much about a landlord-tenant dispute as it is a critique of how the Barangay, as a mediating institution, fails in its task, and further, how other institutions, like the Barangay, often don’t meet the purpose for which they are designed.

To decongest the courts, resolve disputes quickly, and preserve community harmony, the Katarungang Pambarangay Law (Local Government Code, RA 7160, Chapter 7) establishes a mandatory pre-litigation conciliation mechanism that requires the Barangay to initiate a rapprochement process between the two antagonists.

Without taking sides, the duty of the Barangay is to provide a neutral venue and to moderate discussions on the assumption that, given enough time and opportunity, the two disputing parties will, on their own, reconcile their differences.

However, this structure is inadequate to address problems such as those narrated above.  The Barangay might think it is neutral.  But as designed, it has no screening for frivolous or bad-faith claims and no penalty for people who abuse the system.  Instead, it insists on consensus, even when it is impossible.  Mediation over decision-making makes it too weak to address the issues defined above. 

In our story, the landlord was fortunate that the petitioner withdrew their demands before the case was referred to yet another mediating body.  Otherwise, in a spirit of conciliation, the problem would have dragged on, fairness be damned. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied. All told, the Barangay’s logic reinforces the very inefficiencies policymakers claim to oppose.

However, just as this commentary is not about a landlord-tenant dispute, it is also not just about the systemic weakness of the Barangay's mediation efforts.  Rather, it is about the extent to which the Barangay system's design is common across other Philippine institutions.  For example, even when institutions are meant to decide, be they the courts, or tax assessments from the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR), permit revocation from the Local Government Unit (LGU), or license suspension from the Land Transportation Office (LTO), processes are so protracted that they get trapped in a bureaucratic mess.  In many instances, procedural steps are thoughtlessly and too literally followed without regard to the case's unique circumstances, so that due process still fails.  Worse, at the end of the process, compliance remains coerced, not impartially negotiated.

Why is this so?  We can perhaps start with Philippine cultural values, the cultural norms that arise from them, and how these norms underpin our supposedly impartial and rules-based formal institutions.

An institution is an enduring pattern of norms and rules that organises and structures society to meet its fundamental needs.  There are informal institutions, such as kinship, which evolve over time.  On the other hand, formal institutions, such as our laws, are purposely designed to address the needs of the citizenry.  An institution is strong when it meets a fundamental need and weak when it fails by some measure. The Barangay's institution of resolving conflict is one such weak institution.

To explain the origins of the weaknesses in our formal institutions, we can begin with the family, the most basic institution. The Filipino family is governed by relationships of care, authority, respect, and associated expectations and perceptions of obligation. It is indeed a strong informal institution, perhaps too strong, so that its influence permeates other institutions in the country, notably our formal institutions. We are all familiar with norms borrowed from the logic of family and kinship networks: hierarchy, personal loyalty, utang na loob (debt of gratitude), pakikisama (desire to belong), harmony, aversion to confrontation, avoidance of rupture, moral persuasion rather than rule enforcement, and so on. These norms are carried over and become so embedded in other institutions that decision-making guided by impersonal rules is often muted.

Historically, under conditions of colonial domination, reliance on mutual goodwill rather than on an uncaring colonial authority was effective for social cohesion.  But today, even as we are free to build our own institutions, we still have much to learn, especially if we are to serve our all-important economic needs. Personalistic relationships may work in small-scale settings, such as in backyard operations, but they cannot sustain complex economic activities. These require formal, impersonal, and impartial structures; otherwise, they remain weak. Weak institutions erode trust.  As trust declines, people fall back, yet again, to their informal networks, thereby creating a vicious cycle.

Poorly designed formal institutions are one reason foreign investors are discouraged from doing business in the Philippines. Our cultural norms should inform – but not override – institutional purpose.  For instance, harmony is desirable, but justice is indispensable. When these norms, so helpful to family relations, are inappropriately embedded in formal legal structures, the result is paralysis.  Disputes linger, transactions become riskier, and costs rise. Doing business in the Philippines is more costly than in many other countries in the region and requires significantly more patience.

Do the reasons for these institutional shortcomings exclusively reside in our deep-seated cultural values as they translate to our social norms, or are they also the product of our schools’ lack of training in critical thinking? Consider DepEd’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy, patterned after the U.S. law enacted in 2001. It aims to close achievement gaps among disadvantaged students. However, we overlooked the fact that, unlike the U.S., we lack the resources to address the issue in a unified manner. The result was that children who couldn’t read, or who couldn’t understand what they read, were promoted regardless, as no child should be left behind.* It took a number of years before the programme designers realised that this haphazard design contributed to an extraordinarily high percentage of functionally illiterate Filipino youth. 

Critical thinking requires asking uncomfortable questions:  Who benefits from this structure? Does anyone bear the cost? What behaviours does it encourage or discourage?  Does it meet its stated purpose? Too often, when our institutions fail, instead of testing whether they actually address fundamental needs, we simply add more layers of process rather than rethink the design.

Educated citizens, policymakers, and civil society leaders must move beyond moral language -- such family values as utang na loob that translates into political patronage, or pakikisama  that leads to meetings where dissent is avoided.  Instead, what we need is structural analysis. Governance is not primarily about virtue, but about authority and accountability.  We don’t need slogans or more laws, but we can apply critical thinking to the institutions we take for granted.

I would hazard a guess that culture is not destiny.  At the very least, cultural attitudes are malleable given the right structures, i.e., structures shape behaviours. Over time, changed attitudes may even lead to change in values. But we need the help of our schools. Currently, a large part of our problem is the failure of our schools.  Many of our teachers assume education is about imparting knowledge.  Education is about teaching students how to think.

In summary:

The Barangay, in its mediating role, fails due to a lack of decision-making authority.  In most cases, knowledge of the intricacies of our legal system is not necessary to determine who, between the opposing parties, is right and who is wrong. 

The Barangay system is only one of many government institutions which are poorly designed.  To this end, it may be useful to examine the underlying suppositions held by many of its designers.

Originating in the family structure, the strongest among Philippine institutions, commonly held values and norms serving the family are transplanted into formally-designed institutions. They are embedded in many of the country's decision-making processes.  Whilst beneficial for social cohesion, they are dysfunctional for economic development.

A contributing factor is the failure of many of our schools to teach critical thinking effectively. The primary function of education is not to impart knowledge but to teach students to think critically. To this end, we need an overhaul of our educational system.

Finally, if we want to lift ourselves out of poverty, we should shift our discussions away from an excessive focus on issues such as corruption or poor law enforcement. Less examined, but arguably more damaging in the long term, is the country’s chronic weakness in institution-building.

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*See Tale of a Public School Teacher