It can be a disorienting thing to live in the present. In 2025, the same year the Philippines ranked as the country most vulnerable to flooding, reports unfolded about how funds intended for the development of flood control and mitigation projects had been plundered by state officials and private contractors. In 2026, the same year that UN scientists released a report warning of the environmental costs of artificial intelligence (AI), the Philippine government announced its decision to join Pax Silica—a US-led initiative aimed at creating a global supply chain for AI and the semiconductor industry—a move which President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. claims will ‘promote investment and economic growth’ for the Philippines.
What does it mean to speak of ‘development’ amidst such troubling times, under a government willing to disregard matters of environmental and collective well-being for the sake of profit, which accrues not for the Filipino public but a narrow domestic and foreign elite?
‘Development’ and economic growth
The Philippines has long adopted a neoliberal path to development, which conflates progress with ‘economic growth’ achieved chiefly through economic policies of privatisation, deregulation, and liberalisation. In this development model, the primary responsibility of the state rests not so much in nurturing collective society through the provision of social welfare or the redistribution of resources, but in creating a conducive environment for the market to thrive.
Some scholars trace the development of the Philippines into a neoliberal state back to the period of colonisation, when the Philippines, under Spain, first became integrated in the capitalist world system, and when its political economy, once primarily communal in structure, became organised around the logic of privatisation. This neoliberal project has since expanded and intensified, as state and private interests fuse, and as the nation’s wealth and power become concentrated in the hands of a few business and political elites.
The ‘Archipelago of Hazards’
The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of e few has shaped the Philippines’ landscape as ‘an archipelago of hazards’ of many sorts—social, economic, and environmental. In this system, wages can be kept low if it can lure foreign corporations to invest. Communities can be displaced and ecosystems destroyed if the land they inhabit is deemed desirable for private interests to erect infrastructure that can generate profit, such as shopping malls or luxury hotels.
The power and impunity that political and business elites enjoy in this system is what emboldens many to siphon off funds meant for the protection of everyday people from flooding. It is estimated that approximately 42.3–118.5 billion Philippine pesos (713 million–two billion USD) a year has been lost to flood control corruption from 2023 to 2025. Yet this financial loss, while significant and consequential, appears almost trivial if we think about the cost to human lives borne from the absence of sufficient and well-functioning flood control structures. In a nation that endures around 20 typhoons a year, alongside other weather-based calamities that result in the death of hundreds, these acts of corruption are a form of violence that carry deadly consequences.
Environmental damage and injustice
This neoliberal developmental model is also what enables the government to present their decision join Pax Silica, as part of a semiconductor and artificial intelligence hub in New Clark City, as a step towards progress. President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. has proclaimed that this will ‘bring quality jobs to our people, accelerate our industrial competitiveness, and revitalise our economy.’
What is obscured and downplayed in this discourse is the damage the project is expected to have on the surrounding environment and communities. Some have raised concerns about how establishing the hub, for instance, threatens water security as it is set to be built in a drought prone area of Luzon, and expected to consume large amounts of water. Experts have pointed out that, given such high demands for water, the hub may need to rely ‘on groundwater and community water systems’ that in turn, ‘could lead to aquifer depletion, reduced access to potable water and contamination risks from untreated semiconductor wastewater containing heavy metals and toxic chemicals.’
Others have also highlighted concerns about the vast areas of land that the hub will require, which will likely lead to the displacement of around 20,000 Indigenous people and farmers.
There have also been broader concerns about the extractive nature of this initiative, which will involve mining some of the Philippine’s resources. This risks the repetition of a familiar pattern in Southeast Asia where technology and intellectual property are developed elsewhere while countries such as the Philippines are used for resource extraction.
Towards more just futures
The conditions highlighted above underscore the need for transformative changes to how development is imagined and practiced. It emphasises the need to think of development with a focus less on how certain actions impact the Philippine’s economic growth, and more on how they impact everyday people, as well as the water, land and air that sustain life. Moreover, it highlights the need to hold predatory elites accountable for their complicity in corruption and violence that expose everyday Filipinos to hazards such as flooding, and for structural changes to be made to dislodge the power these elites hold.
Such changes are especially urgent in an age of climate crisis, for there can be no economic growth, or an economy at all, in a world pushed passed its collapse. As scholars have noted, climate change poses existential threats for the Philippines. As for many countries in Southeast Asia, these threats are not in the distant future. The impacts of climate change are already unfolding, as can be seen through the increasing frequency of typhoons and flooding in the region.
Transformative changes to how development is imagined and practiced are difficult to pursue and realise, especially given the history of violence that has been directed against actors who have challenged state and business interests. This is reflected in the fact that the Philippines regularly appears as the country with the highest number of environmental activists killed in Asia.
Yet such efforts to resist and re-imagine what it means to grow and develop as a nation do exist. Even amid various threats, voices of resistance remain vocal and persistent. Through the work of these actors, whether they be activists, artists, or academics, an alternative path to development is being paved. A path that shifts the discussion from the narrow focus on economic growth towards the redistribution of wealth, the holistic well-being of everyday people and the environment, and a path which values Indigenous and Local Knowledges as vital to the flourishing of the nation.
This article is part of a special series to mark this year’s Southeast Asia Oration and Southeast Asia Update, hosted by Asialink and Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, with support from the ASEAN-Australia Centre.
Image: People standing in water almost to knee height in a flooded street in Metro Manila. Credit: Tear Cordez/Pexels.
