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The Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino administration witnessed a series of social policy reforms such as Republic Act (RA) 10533 (K-12 Law) and RA 10354 (Reproductive Health Law). The political process of this reform is full of intellectual puzzles considering the conventional knowledge on Philippine politics, which is mainly shaped by the framework of weak state. Why was the administration able to carry out the reforms despite the strong opposition from vested interests sustaining the weak state? This paper argues that ambitious politicians, i.e., those who differ in policy positions and seek to challenge the existing power structure, can work with policy advocates both in public and private sectors and create policy coalitions which result into policy reform. By tracing the political process of forming the policy coalitions, this paper aims to reveal the dynamic aspect of Philippine politics which has been neglected because of the dominance of the weak state framework.

Life of the "developmental state" concept has its ups and downs. Its heyday had lasted from the mid-1980s until the Asian financial crisis broke out in the late 1990s. Many analysts considered that it would face almost certain death following that crisis, during which the term "developmental state" seemed to connote "crony capitalism". Nonetheless, its flagging fortune has been revived again in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2007-08, as the so-called Washington Consensus, with an opposing emphasis on deregulation and liberalization, is subject to growing criticisms (Helleiner 2010; Birdsall and Fukuyama 2011). Meanwhile, the Beijing Consensus, reminding most observers of the developmental state concept, has attracted increasing attention worldwide (Halper 2010). More fundamentally, however, renewed interest in the developmental state is due to the fact that the debate itself focuses on questions that are unlikely to easily fade into insignificance, that is, the relationship between the state, the market and civil society as well as the political and institutional foundations for long-term economic development (Hayami and Aoki 2001; Haggard 2015). Of course, the traditional understanding of the developmental state had already become obsolete. Early studies were seriously problematic not only in their statecentric view and post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning but also their samples which were small in number and limited or biased toward Asian economies (more on this below). Moreover, international and domestic contexts have changed considerably. While the wider process of globalization has increasingly reduced the latitude of policy choice for developing countries, the democratization process has rationalized the demands of domestic voters for income redistribution and public provision as well as the elimination of intolerable inefficiencies and injustice. As a result, unlike the

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