Speakers
Speakers
Speakers
More about the Speaker
Kenneth Isaiah Ibasco Abante organizes collective action for sustainable impact in public finance with the Citizens' Budget Tracker, in public transport with the Move As One Coalition, and in public data with WeSolve. He is a part-time research faculty member at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in Ateneo de Manila University. His research looks into how civil society can claim democratic spaces in tax reform, customs reform, and public budgeting processes.
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Serving in the Department of Finance for four and a half years, he worked on reforms in tobacco and alcohol taxation, tax incentives, customs administration, and local finance. He staffed for the national budgets of 2014 to 2017 and co-led the transition process from Secretary Purisima to Secretary Dominguez.
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He graduated in 2012 with a degree in management engineering and a minor in philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University.
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In 2019, he finished his master in public administration in international development at Harvard Kennedy School and was awarded the class's two top distinctions in policy analysis and commitment to international development. He taught economics at Harvard College and was awarded two Derek C. Bok Center certificates for distinction in teaching.
Talk Details
Date: December 11, 2020 (Friday)
Time: 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Platform: Private FB Live
Talk Synopsis
Good, clean data sets are a necessary condition for good governance and decision-making. But open data does not automatically lead to inclusive outcomes for those who are in most need. To bridge the gap, I build a case for organizing coalitions for good public data for the public good using the framework of Quality (good data), Access (public data), Governance (data for the public good).
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I reflect on lessons from three reform cases and works in progress in Philippine public finance: customs reform, national and local budget tracking, and tax and spending scorecards for provinces, cities, and municipalities.
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In the Philippines, the frontier is not in machine learning, but in opening up machine-readable data. One key challenge in upholding our constitutional right to freedom of information is to build in-house statistical capacity in national and local government agencies to improve their data disclosures and documentation, which can be accessed in websites by researchers and the general public.
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I conclude with some reflections about the importance of research in claiming democratic spaces where civil society and the state can critically collaborate. We can reform even our most “hopeless” problem areas, like smuggling and traffic, if we study hard enough and organize towards collective solutions. Research empowers us to act and organize in our communities. Research inoculates us from despair, especially as we grapple with the twin climate-covid crises which our generation is inheriting.