NEWS
2025.10.30
【Report】The 82nd AJI Frontier Seminar was held! Dr. Joanna Luisa B. Obispo presented “Policy Promises and Precarious Realities: Insights from Non-State Actors in the Philippine Creative Industries.”
The 82nd AJI Frontier Seminar was held online on Tuesday, October 14, 2025. Dr. Joanna Luisa B. Obispo, a senior researcher at Ritsumeikan Asia-Japan Research Organization, Ritsumeikan University, Japan, gave a presentation on “Policy Promises and Precarious Realities: Insights from Non-State Actors in the Philippine Creative Industries.”
Dr. Obispo began by explaining that her presentation would discuss the roles of non-state actors in the creative industries of the Philippines, in order to analyze the tensions between policy promises and the actual lived realities of creative workers. In spite of recent legislation, the Philippine’s creative workers remain insecure, and their contributions are undervalued. She investigated how non-state actors perceive, navigate, and respond to the gap between the policy promises of creative industry development and the precarious realities of creative work.
Dr. Obispo explained that freelancers outside formal labor and insurance frameworks are subjected to income instability, a lack of benefits, and bias, as marketable export-oriented digital fields were favored over indigenous performing arts. COVID-19 magnified this vulnerability, as freelancers received no income support. Dr. Obispo identified issues such as policies focusing on creative outputs, not creative people, and the lack of a national creative workers’ registry. To fill this gap, NGOs, guilds, universities, private initiatives acting as de facto welfare providers and policy translators have created databases and relief systems to gain state attention, combining advocacy, pedagogy, and community solidarity, but they are limited by their dependance on volunteerism, project funding, and intermittent support. These non-state actors’ reflections reveal a creative economy sustained not only by passion but by unpaid care, advocacy, and improvisation.
Dr. Obispo concluded by stating that existing government policies are necessary but insufficient and must evolve into genuine co-governance frameworks. She highlighted how non-state actors fill crucial gaps, but need formal institutional recognition, long-term funding, and policy participation in shaping discourses on welfare and recognition, to fulfil their potential to ensure sustainable creative futures.
In the Q&A session following Dr. Obispo’s presentation, questions were raised about the status of creative workers in other countries, such as Japan and Korea, and the problems of supporting indigenous performers in rural areas. She pointed out how the differences in the economic conditions affect the survival of the creative arts and hoped that the great talent that Filipinos possess would gain the support it deserves.
Dr. Joanna Luisa B. Obispo making her presentation
Please visit the following link for previous AJI Frontier Seminars:
https://en.ritsumei.ac.jp/research/aji/young_researcher/seminar/archive/