At the outset dealing with two rival development strategies—Diffusion1 and Dependency2, the present research evaluates the existing development planning process in Guimaras, Philippines. To appraise the development planning process at work in the province, the study constricts itself to one form of infrastructure development, i.e. transportation or accessibility infrastructures, and more specifically the horizontal (HAIs) and vertical accessibility infrastructures (VAIs) within the transportation planning system. The present research contends that despite popular support for endogenous development strategies, the official planning approach in most developing countries and within Guimaras is still exogenous in nature. The research further asserts that the existing evaluation process for selection and prioritization of infrastructure projects also augments the conventional exogenous development approach and falls short of inducing public involvement in the evaluation and prioritization process. Using the common medium of public priorities and concerns and existing local capabilities and potentials as a basis of evaluation, the study proposes an improvement to the existing evaluation process by introducing a complementary mechanism in the form of the project evaluation and prioritization matrix (PEPM). Based on the results of household and boat passenger surveys, focused group discussion (FGD) and PEPM, the study recommends that the existing development planning process which is objective-oriented and exogenous in nature should be transformed into a problem-oriented endogenous development process. Taking the two cases of HAIs and VAIs, the study further recommends that an ideal development approach would be to follow the norms of the people, and to develop HAIs as a first priority and then to use their value-added potential for the development of VAIs.
