Local Governance and State-Society Relations in Morocco and Jordan
Panel 165, 2011 Annual Meeting
On Saturday, December 3 at 2:30 pm
Panel Description
The four papers in this panel each address issues of local (municipal) governance in the Middle East and North Africa. While a substantial amount of literature has been written on authoritarian regimes, such as Morocco and Jordan, from the perspective of national level politics, relatively little has been written on the municipal level. Yet citizens of authoritarian regimes have their greatest contact with government at the municipal level. The municipal level offers an important interface between the state and the citizen, one where we find important elements of both political change and state control. Taken together, these four papers examine the interplay between local efforts at political change and state strategies of control. All four papers furthermore highlight the important role that social service delivery plays in local governance and state-society relations. Two of the four papers examine municipal service provision. The paper on Jordan examines the variation of service delivery by municipalities according to tribal diversity and questions the relationship between tribal diversity and clientelism. The paper on Morocco examines municipal partnerships with private companies in order to generate revenues for improved service delivery. It argues that these initiatives, many of which are fostered by international donors, are contributing to an ongoing process of depoliticization - the marginalization of debates regarding the sources and distribution of power -- within the country and thereby serving to entrench authoritarianism. The third paper examines the relationship between the National Human Development Initiative (INDH), launched by the Moroccan King in 2005 and designed to improve socio-economic conditions in targeted poor areas, and civil society actors at the local level. Much like the paper on Jordan, it questions the degree to which service delivery provided through the INDH and local civil society actors is based on clientelism and personal interests and the degree to which these traditional methods of state control have been resisted or changed. Finally, the fourth paper, also on Morocco, examines the experience of women councilors at the municipal level, elected in 2009 as a result of Morocco's new quota system. It examines not only the impact of their gender but, just as importantly, their past experience as NGO leaders on their experience and their priorities and outcomes. All four papers are based on recent indepth fieldwork in Jordan and Morocco.
Diversity has been blamed for poor public goods provision in a number of different contexts. It is associated with reduced spending on services, meager rates of tax collection, and poor policies. At the same time, recent research has indicated that only certain types of diversity are associated with poor services and that in some cases diversity can actually improve service provision. I argue in this chapter that the relationship between the groups themselves is essential for understanding diversity’s impact on public goods provision. When relations are poor, public goods provision suffers; but this is not true for diverse groups everywhere. Through focusing on the case study of Jordan where tribes have relations characterized by mutual respect, I show that tribal diversity does not lead to poor service provision. I also argue that tribal cohesion is important in understanding the impact of tribal diversity on public goods provision—when tribes are cohesive, increasing diversity can positively impact service provision as it introduces greater electoral competition amongst candidates for the municipal council.
This paper addresses the role that social service delivery plays in authoritarian persistence. The literature on social service delivery in the Middle East and North Africa focuses primarily on the role that social services as provided by oppositional groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, play in terms of recruitment and in terms of the degree to which they undermine the legitimacy of the authoritarian state. However, relatively little has been written on authoritarian states’ responses. To what extent have authoritarian states responded to the successful delivery of social services by non-state actors? To what extent does the provision of social services entrench or stabilize authoritarianism in the region and, if so, how? Using the case study of Morocco, this paper addresses these questions by examining municipal provision of services and specifically new initiatives at public-private partnerships at the municipal level. In order to raise their revenues and ultimately elevate their level of social service delivery, many municipalities in Morocco have begun entering public private partnerships (PPPs). PPPs are becoming an integral part of municipalities’ local development strategies and are becoming increasingly important to the successful delivery of services. This trend is being strongly encouraged by international donors as part of larger efforts at municipal capacity building and poverty alleviation. Based on fieldwork conducted in municipalities throughout Morocco in winter 2011, this paper argues that the trend towards PPPs is contributing to a larger process of depoliticization -- the marginalization of questions of legitimacy – in Morocco (Maghroui, 2002). This paper argues, that new initiatives, such as PPPs, to improve service delivery at the municipal level are contributing to the marginalization of debate on the sources and distribution of power.
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.
For many decades, women have played a secondary role in Moroccan political life. They were largely under-represented in institutions such as labour unions and political parties, and were almost absent from the parliament and local councils. The situation changed noticeably after the legislative elections in 2002: a quota system was introduced right before the polls, which led to a substantial increase in the number of female members of parliament. At the local level, however, women remained absent from most elected councils until very recently. In order to increase the very low percentage of female representatives in these councils, a new form of quota was introduced just before the 2009 municipal elections. In each district, an additional list, restricted to women, was attached to the standard list of candidates mainly composed of men. This form of positive discrimination led to a substantial increase in the number of female candidates and eventually contributed to the increase of women’s representation in municipal and communal councils from 0,54% (in 2003) to more than 12% (in 2009).
Whereas such increases have been highlighted - at the national as well as international level – as clear signs of Morocco’s move towards a more egalitarian political system, gender analysts have highlighted the need to look beyond such figures in order to identify the inequalities, as well as the new configurations that might lie underneath them, which might shed new light on processes such as those aiming at promoting participation. Thus, my paper will seek to analyse the inclusion process of women into Moroccan local politics from a micro-sociological perspective, on the basis of multi-situated ethnographic investigations I have conducted while following, in situ, the campaign of three female candidates – and former NGO leaders - who are living in suburban areas of Casablanca. Through a description of their first experience as political candidates, I will mainly analyse the impact that their past as NGO leaders, as well as their gender have had on the ways they planned and led their campaign.
