Government Watch (G-Watch) is a national citizen movement that aims to improve governance and deepen democracy through the scaling of accountability and citizen empowerment. G-Watch has more than two decades of experience in citizen monitoring and action research on transparency, participation and accountability. It is currently present in 13 localities all over the Philippines with partners and allies from civil society, government and international community.
G-Watch is formerly a social accountability program of a university that rebooted to an independent action research organization embedded in constituencies of civic and advocacy-oriented organizations all over the Philippines aiming to contribute in the deepening of democracy through the scaling of accountability and citizen empowerment.
G-Watch was established in 2000 to respond to a plethora of corruption scandals involving government officials in the Philippines. For 15 years, G-Watch has undertaken several pioneering work on social accountability and citizen monitoring, capacitating hundreds of citizen-monitors, who checked the delivery of public services. It has convened various fora and conferences, facilitating dialogues and sharing of experience and reflections among reform and development actors. It has published numerous publications on citizen engagement and political and governance reforms along with its sister initiative, Political Democracy and Reforms (PODER).
In years of its work, G-Watch has nurtured a broad network of partners, allies and contacts in the Philippines and abroad. It has established linkages with a wide variety of organizations in civil society and development community, as well as with government agencies at the national, sub-national and local levels in the Philippines. G-Watch's experience has been presented in numerous international conferences all over the world and has been documented in various publications.
In 2017, G-Watch has established an institutional partnership with Accountability Research Center (ARC) based in School of International Service at American University in Washington DC to further study and explore strategic approaches to accountability. This partnership paved the way for continuing multi-level and strategic accountability work of G-Watch since 2017 to present.
At its foundation as an independent organization, the core G-Watch network is composed of eleven civic formations present in at least nine regions in the Philippines: seven G-Watch local core groups/ hubs that were formed through G-Watch Localization and constituency-building initiatives in the past five years, as well as four national and regional CSO partners involved in social accountability and rights-based campaigns.
As an action research organization, G-Watch hopes to provide an effective intellectual and civic bridge between the local, national and global arenas in the TPA field, promoting multi-directional dialogues to inform theory and practice in TPA. Having done several pioneering social accountability initiatives with its extensive network and with its independent citizen monitoring and research profile, G-Watch is well-poised to play this role deemed important in advancing a different way of doing TPA that is needed worldwide today.