This document presents key findings from the National Dialogue on Water in the Philippines, which took place from September 2024 to December 2025 and sets out an Action Plan with clearly articulated recommendations. The Dialogue aimed to strengthen economic regulation and support the expansion and improvement of water supply and sanitation services in the Philippines. It identifies options and formulates recommendations in three interlinked areas:
To better design and implement tariff arrangements and improve economic regulation
To rationalise water and sanitation services delivery through service consolidation
To develop a Centralised National Integrated Water Information System
The Dialogue was conducted under the supervision of the Government of the Philippines, jointly represented by the Department of Economy, Planning and Development (DEPDev), formerly the National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources Water Resource Management Office (DENR-WRMO). It has been supported by the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment (MCEE) of the Republic of Korea and has been facilitated by teams of experts from the Asia Water Council (AWC) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), who prepared this report. The report brings together findings from a literature review, a questionnaire filled out by various government institutions, workshops and stakeholder interviews. Strong engagement with stakeholders across the country made it a true dialogue.
Water policies around the world are in urgent need of reform and water challenges cannot be resolved all at once. This is also the case in the Philippines, with a range of policy and institutional challenges. The Dialogue took place amid a rapidly evolving policy environment, including a proposed legislation in the form of a Bill submitted to be passed in Congress that would establish both a new sector policy-making body, the Department of Water Resources (DWR) and a consolidated economic regulator, the Water Regulatory Commission (WRC). The Dialogue seeks to clarify regulatory priorities ahead of the Water Regulatory Commission’s creation and to explore how it could be effectively integrated into an institutional and regulatory landscape that is currently characterised by multiple regulatory bodies, overlapping mandates and significant segments of the water sector that remain insufficiently or entirely unregulated. Meanwhile, approaches to tariff-setting for service provision are fragmented, and, for certain categories of providers, tariff decisions are not insulated from broader ownership and political considerations. At the same time, water supply and sanitation services in the Philippines face substantial fragmentation and sectoral data collection and management remain dispersed among multiple government agencies in the absence of a central coordinating body.
To address those challenges, the Dialogue centred around the topic of strengthening economic regulation, by formulating recommendations on principles and objectives for tariff arrangements and the various options available to better design and implement tariff arrangements (Chapter 2), identifying options for rationalising water and sanitation services delivery through service consolidation (Chapter 3) and options to develop a Centralised National Integrated Water Information System (Chapter 4). The main recommendations emerging from the report have been brought together under a single Roadmap (Chapter 5), with the objective of fostering coherence between policy reforms.