An Act Institutionalizing Conflict Sensitivity in the Different Planning Processes Throughout the Hierarchies of the Bangsamoro Government

This requires the region to analyse conflict before it plans, and it attaches that requirement to the planning documents local governments already have to produce.

The scope covers all provincial, city, municipal and barangay governments, the interior ministry, and every ministry and agency involved in preparing a Comprehensive Development Plan, a Contingency Plan or a Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Plan. Where practicable, conflict sensitivity and the Do No Harm principle apply to other planning processes too.

At the regional level, the Bangsamoro Regional Peace and Order Council must produce a Bangsamoro Peace and Order Status Report within 12 months of the implementing rules — an annual conflict analysis assessing ongoing armed or violent conflicts, evaluating the capacity of the regional government and its ministries to prevent, manage, resolve and transform conflict, and identifying 3 categories of area: those with ongoing or active protracted armed conflict, those conflict-affected, and those vulnerable to armed conflict or violence. The Report is revised twice a year to account for changing conflict factors and presented to Parliament.

Beneath it, every local government conducts its own conflict analysis, integrated into existing planning rather than added alongside it, and indispensable for any area the regional Report has identified. Barangays may do a lighter conflict assessment. The Act specifies the key elements an analysis must contain while leaving the framework to be designed or adopted from existing practice.

The consequences are built into approval and money. Section 12 requires local governments to prioritise policies based on robust conflict analysis, and programmes and projects resulting from conflict analyses conducted in advance are to be given priority in approval and resource allocation. Comprehensive Development Plans must be based on the Report and the local analyses, with the sectoral issues of vulnerable groups highlighted throughout. Local Development Council members must undergo conflict sensitivity capacity development, and planning teams must complete training on the Do No Harm Action and Relationship Frameworks.

The Regional Peace and Order Council leads; anything not expressly assigned falls to the interior ministry. A Bangsamoro Conflict Monitoring System and a capacity development programme support it, with assistance from peace partners expressly contemplated.

The premise is that development spending in a conflict-affected region is never neutral. A road, a school or a water system allocates something scarce between communities that may be in dispute, and a project designed without reference to that can deepen the conflict it was meant to relieve — which is what the Do No Harm framework exists to prevent.

The region is the obvious place to legislate it. Most of its territory falls into 1 of the 3 categories the Report is required to identify, its development budget is large relative to its institutions, and its own peace agreement commits it to conflict transformation rather than only to service delivery.

Section 12 is what separates this from a reporting requirement. Analysis obligations are easy to enact and easy to satisfy on paper; what makes them bite is attaching them to money, and this bill does — programmes and projects that come out of conflict analyses conducted beforehand get priority in approval and in resource allocation. That gives a mayor a reason to do the analysis properly rather than to commission it after the project is chosen.

The 3-category classification is the provision with the most consequences the bill does not discuss. Designating an area as having active protracted armed conflict, or as conflict-affected, or as vulnerable, is a determination with effects well beyond planning — on investment, on insurance, on how a community is policed and perceived. The bill requires the classification, revises it twice a year, and says nothing about whether a local government may contest its designation. For something revised that often, and presented to Parliament, that is a gap worth closing.

Making the analysis indispensable only in already-identified areas is a sensible rationing of effort and carries a predictable failure. Conflict in this region is often latent before it is active, and the places that most need a Do No Harm analysis may be the ones the Report has not yet flagged. The bill's answer is that analysis is integrated into ordinary planning everywhere and merely indispensable in the identified areas, which is the right structure if the ordinary requirement is enforced and a loophole if it is not.

Read against the enacted Local Governance Code, this bill is the missing piece. BAA 49 requires newly elected local officials to undergo continuing training that includes conflict-sensitivity and peacebuilding — a provision Parliament added in committee and which takes effect immediately. That trains the officials; this bill would have conditioned their plans and their budgets. Half of the design is law and the half with the money attached has sat in committee since October 2022.