This paper examines the implications of the National Initiative for Human Development(known under its French acronym, INDH) for local governance in Morocco, including state power and individual empowerment. This initiative, launched by the King in 2005, is designed to improve socio-economic conditions in targeted poor areas through new participatory local governance mechanisms designed to empower local communities and municipalities. To this end, Local Human Development Committees have been created in all provinces and municipalities concerned. However, this paper argues that the INDH’s governance mechanisms in fact serve to strengthen the power of the appointed representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, especially at the province level, at the expense of local governments. As a result, the local councilors tend to occupy the space of ‘civil society’ as presidents of local associations which are the privileged vehicle to access INDH funding. Local elites thus base their social legitimacy increasingly on their renewed alliance with the King through the INDH and the local clientelist relations it allows them to maintain, rather than on their status as political representatives. I also find that the form of participation as practiced by the INDH is mostly limited to consultation rather than real involvement in community development. By investigating how the INDH relates to Morocco’s recent decentralization reforms and local accountability issues, the paper argues that rather than counterbalancing state power, the INDH serves as a vehicle for state-and donor-sponsored forms of neoliberal citizen participation. It may therefore best be considered as the latest tool in the Moroccan monarchy’s toolbox of ‘authoritarian upgrading’, undermining the potential for representative democracy in the name of a ‘façade’ participatory democracy. The recent popular protests in Morocco and demands for constitutional reforms show that citizens are increasingly aware of and discontent with living in a façade democracy.