An Act Creating the Bangsamoro Sustainable Development Board, Defining Its Powers and Functions, Providing Funds Therefor and for Other Purposes

This creates a board to decide how the region uses what is under its ground and in its waters — and, unusually, it is a joint body. The Senior Minister chairs it; a National Government official co-chairs it; up to six national representatives sit alongside the regional environment, interior and finance ministers, the planning authority, the chair of Parliament's environment committee, and one representative elected by recognized NGOs.

Section 3 sets out the framework it must formulate, and the drafting there is unlike anything else in the registry. The governing principle is Moral Governance, defined in the text as rules and processes 'completely devoid of all the evils of graft and corruption'. Beneath it sit four principles, the first of which is Environmental Vicegerency — invoking *Khalifa*, the trusteeship and stewardship of the earth — alongside Social Justice and Well-Being, Respect to Culture, Belief and Heritage, and Economic Progress with Equity.

And Section 10 does something concrete. Not less than 1% of all revenues collected from the exploration, development and utilization of natural resources in the Bangsamoro is allocated to run the Board — and that amount shall not be deducted from the block grant the region receives under the Organic Law.

Section 11 requires the Board to review the act's own implementation after 5 years and every 5 years after, with Parliament part of the process.

To put economic, social and environmental considerations into a single framework before the region's resources are developed, rather than after — and to do it jointly with the National Government, which retains substantial authority over natural resources.

The clause worth reading twice is the one about the block grant. Earmarking 1% of resource revenues for environmental governance is a reasonable idea that could be entirely undone by arithmetic: the region funds the Board from resource revenue, and the National Government reduces the block grant by the same amount, leaving the Bangsamoro exactly where it started and the Board funded out of its own pocket. Section 10 forecloses that in a single proviso. Whoever drafted it understood that in a fiscal relationship as intricate as this one, the money matters less than where it is counted.

The framework in Section 3 is the other thing that sets this act apart. Most legislation states its principles in the vocabulary of administration; this one states them in the vocabulary of trusteeship, and grounds environmental duty in *Khalifa* — stewardship of the earth on behalf of God. That is a genuine attempt to write a development framework in terms the region's own population would recognize as binding, rather than in borrowed language from an international convention. It sits beside Moral Governance, which is defined as the absence of graft — an anti-corruption principle stated as the compass for everything else.

What the act does not give the Board is teeth. It formulates, promotes, calls upon, monitors and reviews. It does not license, does not inspect, does not sanction. So the 1% funds a body whose influence over an actual extraction project runs entirely through the policies it writes and the ministries that apply them — and, as with the flag and the calendar acts, the duty is stated without a consequence attached. One small marker of the same looseness: the signed copy carries the Chief Minister's signature above a blank date line, the second act in this registry found in that condition.