This book discuses urban development and poverty, natural resource management, and transnational migration in the Philippines. It has a two-pronged task: to identify the process of neoliberal restructuring of “the social” observed in the social policies and development in the Global South, with the Philippines as a specific case, and to discuss what kind of alternative public sphere, which will be conceptualized as a “vernacular public sphere”, is emerging in such restructuring. Under contemporary globalization, and particularly with the progress of the neoliberal restructuring of “the social”, widespread arguments have emerged on the “withdrawal“, “shrinking“, “loss“, and “collapse“ of “the social”. Although the potential contours of alternative institutions and ideas after such restructuring remain unclear, we are increasingly reminded that our existence faces precarity and uncertainty, particularly by unpredictable incidents, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hence an urgent task to reimagine and reconceptualize “the social“ in times of precarity and uncertainty. The present work deals squarely with this task by shedding light on the emergence of the alternative public sphere in the Global South.