Democratic Resource or Institutional Trap? Processes of Decentralization in post-2011 Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen
Panel 073, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 16 at 1:30 pm
Panel Description
Much touted as a cure to authoritarianism, projects of decentralization and support to local authorities (municipalities, regional councils, etc) have generated a lot of expectation among populations in Arab countries that managed to oust their respective dictator in 2011. Except for Egypt, deeply entrenched in its centralized model of formal authority, "revolutionary" cases of 2011 have proposed or adopted new constitutional order enshrining decentralized authority. But what exactly has been realized under the name of decentralization? What are (unintended) consequences of these policies on the balance of power between state and societal forces at the state and sub-state levels?
All three countries discussed in this panel, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, experienced a revolutionary process which forced the reform of their political system towards a federalist path (project for a new Yemeni constitution in 2014, later abandoned because of the civil war), empowerment of « local authorities » (Tunisia with municipal elections to be held in May 2018), and the strong emphasis on local powers (municipalities and regions) as new bases for the exercise of authority in Libya. The panel offers a comparative perspective on these three countries, by raising common questions: What have been influences of past models of state-building and in the exercise of authority since independence? How path-dependent are national trajectories when it comes to promote decentralization and local forms of governance? During and after the revolutionary moments of 2011, what have been solutions discussed by political actors? What have been the venues in which decentralization became a formal objective? How influential have the international communities in shouldering one approach to decentralization or the other (European, American, and Arab diplomacy, but also international aid)? What are unintended consequences of the recent focus on local power for the project of consolidating states and for the overall egalitarian enfranchisement of Libyan, Tunisian and Yemeni citizens?
The panel offers thus a critical re-appraisal of the concept and practice of decentralization in the Arab worlds through three case-studies that reflect a variety of cases that are generally considered important in shaping more or less democratic systems (different intensities and forms of colonialism; republicans vs monarchist legacies; homogenous vs heterogenous populations; more or less relevance of oil rent, etc). It tackles also the question whether decentralization can be a meaningful institution or just a fig leaf to hide resistance to democratic power sharing mechanisms.
In 2014, Tunisia constitutionalized the principle of creating a decentralized "local power", following into the footsteps of other countries that have previously took the path towards a democratic transition. The transfer of some of the powers of the Tunisian State to locally elected officials was intended by the "constituents" (members of the National Constituent Assembly) as a way to break with the regimes of Bourguiba and Ben Ali (1956-2011), where the tendencies of state centralism and authoritarianism seemed to have mutually reinforced each other. This paper therefore proposes to analyze the process of decentralization in Tunisia by focusing on the project of the "constituents", which was to rebuild the power relations between the State and local authorities (Chapter VII of the Tunisian Constitution). This reorganization mainly involves today two types of actors: a) the representatives of the State – ministries of Interior, Local affairs, Finance, and Equipment, as well as governors and delegates (wali and mo'tamad ) of provinces - and b) representatives of local populations - presidents of municipal councils, parliamentarians and civil society associations.
By describing the changes in their institutional and political relations - such as state supervision and the decision-making power of locally elected representatives - we will aim to analyse the process of political and financial empowerment of local authorities vis-a-vis the State. This will also allow us to examine if these changes have an impact on the consolidation of the Tunisian democratic transition at the local level, especially after the municipal elections of 2018.
This paper is based on a series of interviews conducted over the last two years with the main actors of the decentralization in Tunisia, as well as surveys in three localities (Sfax, Mednine and Hay Ettadhamen in the suburbs of Tunis). While the decentralization process is often looked at by academics and experts from a technical and formal angle of how local government fits into the institutional-territorial architecture, this study will analyse the decentralization as a cross-national dimension of Tunisian politics in its context of a democratic transition, thus offering a different perspective on the process.
The paper offers an overview of the work carried out by the Yemeni National Dialogue Conference (2013-2014), and which proposed the creation of a federal state with more open inclusive political order to soothe decades of internal tensions, north (Huthi) and south (separatist movement). It offers a “law and/in society” perspective on earlier attempts to propose decentralized mechanisms of governance in contemporary Yemeni history. Promises to anchor local structures of governance keep recurring at critical junctures in Yemeni history (in 1963 and 1964, when the Zaydi Imamate was toppled by republican revolutionaries; in 1970 during the finalization of the YAR "permanent constitution”; during debates in the mid-1960s prior to the establishment of South Yemen (PRDY); at the Amman agreement in Febr. 1994 before the civil war; and in the 2011 revolution). This begs the question of how path-dependent these discussions for decentralized forms of authority in contemporary Yemen may be and how other legal institutions favor, or not, the emergence of a federal order in Yemen. In a country characterized by an already or de facto decentralized form of governance (with state-sanctioned legal norms coexisting next to customary and Islamic laws—qadi justice), one can wonder why formal (political) decentralization efforts always fail. The paper offers an overview of how local structures, tribal, and customary law (‘urf), and the practice of embodied and relational Islamic justice (via qadi) have kept influencing and mediating social antagonism in a context where the central state has remained far from fully consolidated. The paper, based mostly on the secondary literature, with a dozen interviews with Yemeni actors involved in the National Dialogue, analyzes how informal mobilization within civil society, and past institutions (such as the makhaleef, old-time Islamic territorial units presented as a solution for the drawing of federal provinces in 2014) can provide insights and solutions to a faulty state-construction. Yemen epitomizes thus some of the “classical” dilemma of legal pluralism and tensions between a patriarchal order and legal-rational forms of authority.
