The unfinished work of autonomy

On Sept. 14, the Philippines will mark another milestone in its decades-long peace process: the first parliamentary election of the Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao (BARMM).

Voters will choose a parliament under institutions that did not exist a generation ago. But some of autonomy’s hardest questions will not appear on the ballot. Once autonomy is secured in law and built into political institutions, how does it change what people actually experience from government?

This is the more demanding phase: making a unique governance arrangement work through the ordinary machinery of government.

Education makes this unusually visible.

The Bangsamoro Organic Law (BOL) describes the region’s education system as a “subsystem of the national education system,” empowered to develop a framework responsive to the needs, ideals, and aspirations of the Bangsamoro people while conforming to national minimum standards.

It is an elegant formulation in law. In administration, it raises a deceptively difficult question: What, exactly, is a subsystem?

There was no ready-made definition, much less a manual for how one should work across national programs, budgets, policies, and lines of accountability. But the principle was clear: Bangsamoro education was designed neither to stand apart from the national system nor to be absorbed by it, but to exercise meaningful autonomy within it.

That balance is delicate. Too much intervention can narrow the space autonomy was meant to create. Too much restraint can appear as though the national government is stepping away from responsibilities it continues to hold. Respect for autonomy, without the arrangements necessary to make it work, can begin to resemble neglect.

The stakes are already high. Stunting among children under 5 in BARMM stands at 36 percent, the highest in the country. Nearly nine in 10 Bangsamoro children aged 3 to 4 are not enrolled in preschool. By Grade 4, learners are performing three to four years behind curriculum expectations in literacy. These conditions have many causes, but their scale leaves little room for uncertainty over who must act, how, and when.

The school-based feeding program offers one illustration. It is a national program, yet national funding for its implementation in BARMM has been unclear since. Behind it lies a much larger question of how national responsibilities should be carried out within an autonomous region.

Department of Justice Legal Opinion No. 2, series of 2026, provided important clarity. Supervision and funding of national programs remain with the national government, while implementation within the Bangsamoro involves shared jurisdiction and requires effective intergovernmental coordination. Put simply, regional autonomy is operationalized through “cooperative mechanisms rather than hierarchical control.”

Respecting Bangsamoro authority does not require the national government to step away, just as fulfilling national responsibilities does not require it to take over. The harder task is building institutions that allow both governments to exercise their respective roles. There is no contradiction in that shared space, just as there is no contradiction in being fully Moro and fully Filipino.

This is where institutional design becomes consequential. If Bangsamoro learners are missing from national targets, they can disappear from budgets, then programs. What begins as ambiguity between governments can end in exclusion.

The BOL anticipated this need elsewhere, creating intergovernmental mechanisms for legislative initiatives, fiscal policy, infrastructure, energy and sustainable development. Education had no comparable standing mechanism.

That is why the establishment of the Bangsamoro Education Coordination Forum in July matters. Not every problem can be solved by drawing a cleaner line between governments. Sometimes, coordination is itself part of the architecture of autonomy.

National and Bangsamoro agencies will have to sit together regularly and work through the practical questions of policy, programs and implementation. The arrangements will not always be elegant, nor familiar. Some will have to be built anew, tested and improved. The goal is that government should no longer have to ask, after each decision, how it applies to the Bangsamoro. That question should already be answered in how the decision is made.

That is the unfinished work of autonomy. The Bangsamoro was given the space to govern itself, but that need not mean governing alone. After all, is that not the promise of peace: not only to make room for one another, but to learn how to belong together?

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Atty. Asmenah M. Barambangan is the chief technical specialist of the Second Congressional Commission on Education.