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Moroccan Regionalization and Sustainable Development
Abstract
The paper presents and analyzes Morocco’s Roadmap to regionalize the country and provides recommendations for the plan’s implementation. The explanation, including from a comparative perspective, of the principle elements of Morocco’s Roadmap to regionalization is based on an exhaustive review of the literature, while the recommendations for regionalization’s implementation draw from project development experiences in Morocco. Morocco’s intention – taken from public statements by King Mohammed VI and interviews with officials involved in the planning process – is to decentralize decision-making authority and management regarding socio-economic development, but also political affairs and other responsibilities. Morocco’s regionalization expands to the whole of the country the basic idea of the Kingdom’s 2007 “autonomy within Moroccan sovereignty” proposal to the United Nations Security Council as a way to resolve the Western Saharan conflict. If successful, regionalization would not only promote human development, but also potentially resolve the conflict and enable deeper cooperation among the Maghreb Union on critical issues such as security, trade, migration, and pollution. The Roadmap incorporates three of the four approaches to decentralization that have been applied in cases in the world, including: 1) devolution, or transferring responsibilities to sub-national government agencies; 2) deconcentration, or enabling provincial and district level bureaucracies to work closely with other sub-national groups within a democratic framework; and 3) delegation, or the participatory method, which includes interactive, information-gathering activities that help local community members jointly evaluate their conditions and then plan and implement projects that are most important to them. The Roadmap does not include privatization. Combining the three above approaches to decentralization builds a framework that transfers authority from the national to the sub-national levels (particularly the regional and provincial levels), where public, civil, and private sectors work collaboratively – with continued national level support – toward implementing development initiatives that ultimately local communities determine and benefit from. The recommendations contained in the essay to implement Moroccan regionalization describe: 1) Moroccan professional positions (local government extenstionsists and politicians, civil society workers, teachers, among others) which are strategically placed to receive training in participatory methods and then apply them with local communities; 2) necessary reforms of the Ministry of Interior in order to build an effective decentralized system; 3) the need and role for a proposed agency of regionalization; and 4) a projection of the cost to implement decentralization based on the Roadmap. Regionalization’s success depends on if it can genuinely advance the fulfillment of local people and communities.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Maghreb
Sub Area
Development