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Abstract: Safeguarding failures within civil society and humanitarian organizations have drawn increasing international attention, highlighting the need for robust institutional mechanisms to prevent abuse, exploitation, and harassment within development programs. While existing safeguarding frameworks have strengthened compliance systems and accountability mechanisms, many remain grounded in governance models developed in the Global North and often lack culturally embedded approaches suited to the realities of civil society organizations in diverse social contexts. This article introduces the BANTAYOG framework, a decolonized safeguarding governance model grounded in Filipino social ethics that integrates relational responsibility, collective accountability, and culturally embedded care practices. By situating safeguarding within indigenous ethical traditions — bayanihan (communal solidarity), malasakit (genuine care), pakikipagkapwa (relational personhood), and pangangalaga (protective nurturing) — the framework advances three theoretical contributions: it reconceptualizes safeguarding as relational ethics rather than institutional compliance; it repositions accountability as collective governance rather than bureaucratic monitoring; and it argues for safeguarding as contextualized practice rather than universal policy template. Although grounded in Filipino ethical traditions, the BANTAYOG framework offers insights that may inform safeguarding governance in other Global South civil society contexts. Drawing on Sikolohiyang Pilipino, decolonial safeguarding theory, feminist pedagogy, and participatory accountability frameworks, the paper develops the BANTAYOG Safeguarding Cosmology — a constellation of 28 Filipino concepts organized across seven spheres of protection (Awareness, Vigilance, Care, Community, Illumination, Empowerment, and Dignity/Flourishing) — and operationalizes this cosmology into seven governance pillars: BANTA (risk awareness), BANTAY (protection systems), ABAY/ANTABAY (survivor care), BAYANIHAN (participatory safeguarding), TANGLAW (transparency and accountability), ANGAT (capacity and empowerment), and TAYOG (dignity and institutional transformation) — constituting the BANTAYOG Seven-Pillar Governance Framework. The paper further introduces the BANTAYOG Hexagon Model — a three-level diagram following a polycentric governance logic, featuring an ethical core, six mutually reinforcing governance pillars connected by bi-directional arrows, and an outer contextual ring encompassing organizational culture, national legal frameworks — including the Philippine Safe Spaces Act (RA 11313, 2019) — community norms, and donor compliance standards, following a polycentric governance logic [37] in which authority is distributed across interdependent relational nodes rather than hierarchical chains — as a structural visualization of relational safeguarding governance; proposes a three-level system integrating the BANTAYOG Philosophy, Framework, and Toolkit; and formulates the BANTAYOG Safeguarding Mantra — BANTA → BANTAY → ABAY → BAYANIHAN → TANGLAW → ANGAT → TAYOG — as a pedagogically accessible ethical spine for safeguarding practice. Guided by three research questions on safeguarding localization, institutional components for community-centered governance, and participatory accountability, the article advances three explicit contributions: a theoretical contribution reconceptualizing safeguarding as relational ethics, collective governance, and contextualized practice; a methodological contribution demonstrating semantic derivation from indigenous language as a replicable framework-building approach; and a practical contribution through the BANTAYOG Toolkit. This article contributes to emerging debates on safeguarding localization and represents one of the first safeguarding frameworks globally to be explicitly grounded in indigenous language epistemology, offering a model for Global South institutional theory development.