From Fragmentation to Cohesion: Charting a Course for Philippine Maritime Security Governance

The Philippines’ crowded maritime bureaucracy faces significant challenges in responding to the imperatives of a strategic environment in flux. To address this, the country must adopt a cohesive maritime security strategy that directs capacity-building efforts, rationalises overlapping mandates and enables effective and efficient decision-making.

Three strategic realities have shaped current Philippine behaviour at sea. First, a heightened sense of maritime threat since the early 2000s has essentially changed the perspectives and priorities of its deeply seablind institutions and leadership. Sea blindness, or the inability to recognise the sea’s importance to national security and well-being, has constrained Philippine strategic thinking for decades. Second, an evolving regional security architecture has opened new pathways for cooperation which are more flexible, more practical and less constrained by regional groupings and alignment structures. More Philippine maritime agencies are actively engaging with external partners in ASEAN, the Indo–Pacific and Europe. Last, rising uncertainties at the international and domestic levels have further complicated the Philippines’ strategic calculus, exposing the vulnerability of a fragmented maritime security governance structure to personalistic leadership, bureaucratic turfing and limited capacity.

This context is already reshaping the roles of Philippine maritime actors, especially in contested waters. At present, 13 support agencies form the backbone of the maritime bureaucracy, with the Philippine Navy and the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) sharing the bulk of maritime security and law enforcement operations. As Chinese aggressive actions stoke tensions in the South China Sea (SCS), the PCG has taken on a more visible political-diplomatic role, mainly for de-escalation. This is a significant addition to their core functions of maritime law enforcement, maritime safety, environmental protection and responding to maritime emergencies over 2.2 million km² of the Philippine maritime domain.

While the PCG has undergone considerable changes in its organisation, education and training, operations and capacity-building, institutional fragmentation, resource limitations and operational challenges continue to plague the broader maritime security governance structure. Due to the interlocked nature of maritime concerns, agency roles overlap. For instance, the National Maritime Council was established in 2024 to provide strategic direction, but for urgent and high-priority concerns that require greater focus, developing ad hoc inter-agency mechanisms such as the National Task Force for the West Philippine Sea has become the default practice. In the last five years, policies to improve governance capacity and strengthen coordination in maritime security, maritime industry development and maritime domain awareness capabilities have been promulgated, but many initiatives remain disjointed and, at times, divergent.

The missing puzzle piece is a cohesive maritime security strategy to ensure coordinated action while building domestic capacity and deepening international partnerships. Anchored in the 2024 legislation on maritime zones and archipelagic sea lanes, this strategy should transcend legal and political issues to provide concrete direction. While the Comprehensive Archipelagic Defense Concept reorients the national defence establishment from decades of a land-centric strategic posture towards securing the maritime domain, a national maritime security strategy would direct the entire maritime bureaucracy, including local government units, under a shared set of priorities.

All this will be for naught without institutionalising best practices.

Three themes should guide this strategy: increasing absorptive capacity to sustain capability development, addressing expectation asymmetries and redundancies, and institutionalising processes and initiatives.

First, for sustainable force development, diversifying and enhancing external partnerships to address capability gaps is not enough; the Philippines must increase its absorptive capacity. Investment in platforms, assets, and systems without recognising where they would fit within the larger defence and maritime law enforcement ecosystems is impractical.

Investing in research and development (R&D) and enhancing technological transfer mechanisms are therefore critical. Central to building a lean and agile force to address maritime threats are investments in hardware and non-material aspects of capability development. For this, there is no substitute for streamlined planning and management processes responsive to the rapidly evolving strategic environment, and considering other aspects of technological development, such as system-of-systems integration, enhancing public-private partnerships for R&D and the development and management of critical infrastructure.

Second, as maritime cooperation expands, creating frameworks to evaluate these partnerships and determine how to deepen them in ways beneficial for all parties should be a priority. Prioritisation and complementarity with partners are vital in balancing limited resources against the urgency of action. Avoiding duplicate initiatives and closing capability gaps require candid, two-way dialogue aimed at identifying specific needs, challenges and available solutions. To address expectation asymmetries about how and where capabilities and facilities are going to be built, deployed and used, the government should be clear about how everything fits within domestic systems. 

All this will be for naught without institutionalising best practices. Given the Philippine maritime security governance context, it is imperative to ensure that processes are streamlined, insulated from political agendas and resilient against external shocks. Reinforcing existing safeguards that aim to increase transparency and lessen political interference, particularly in relation to procurement, human resource management and international cooperation should be a priority.

At the regional level, sustained dialogue among civilian maritime law enforcement agencies such as the ASEAN Coast Guard Forum is necessary to develop collective responses to shared maritime threats, and enhance cooperation and coordination between regional coast guards.

Finally, directing capability development and establishing effective processes for inter-agency coordination and international cooperation, improving the Philippines’ command and control structures and developing comprehensive oversight mechanisms to ensure strategy implementation and management are essential.

Ultimately, a strategy is only as good as its execution.

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