The Fizzling of “Ceboom”: How Jurisdictional Battles and Warring Factions Undermined Cebu’s Development Coalition

Starting in the late 1980s, in a phenomenon dubbed “Ceboom,” Cebu City and its surrounding metropolitan area attracted national envy and international attention as a leading centre of growth within a country facing many economic challenges. This article focuses first on the development coalition in the heyday of Ceboom (1988–1998) and proceeds through two subsequent periods in which this coalition declined (1998–2016) and then effectively collapsed (2016–present). Two important factors explain the fizzling of Ceboom. First, dysfunctional jurisdictional structures inhibit the emergence of coherent metropolitan governance; second, these underlying structural impediments feed into, and are exacerbated by, intense competition among warring factions involving city- and provincial-level politicians. Cebu’s metropolitan region, we argue, will not be able to address multiple pressing development challenges without a coherent system of governance linking its many components; sadly, we do not see how this is likely to emerge in the foreseeable future.