With the 2011 Arab uprisings, the importance of municipal politics in the MENA was sharply brought into the limelight. Yet, with the exception of a limited number of studies (Wallace 2013), municipal politics continue to be under-researched. Research on the uprisings is dominated by studies concerning the macro socio-economic and political causes of the revolutions (Rand 2013; Dabashi 2012) or the social movements that led them (Lynch 2013; Korany and El-Mahdi 2012). While there are studies of 'the local', examining state-society relations (Bouziane et al 2013) and municipal capacity strengthening projects (Bergh 2012, 2010), the dynamics of municipal politics remain neglected.
This panel addresses this lacuna. As documented by neo-liberal scholars Brenner and Theodore (2002), international and national agendas and policy reforms do not occur on a blank slate in which the 'old order' is obliterated and the 'new order' is unfurled as a fully formed totality. Global and national policies and strategies are not simply implemented upon the municipal level. Rather they take place on an aggressively contested institutional landscape that generates contradictions of its own. This panel seeks to examine this two-way interaction between global and national agendas and municipal politics with the aim of shedding greater light on local power dynamics and their significance.
The panel focuses on three types of issue areas and the dynamics they engender at the municipal level: national reforms to the political system; policy reforms directed at municipalities; and national political party agendas and strategies. Taking a bottom-up approach, the papers thus respectively examine: administrative reforms; decentralization reforms; and municipal elections. Examining post-revolutionary Tunisia, the first paper considers the relationship between political forces from the national and regional level and those at the local level to understand when municipal council formation went smoothly and when it was contested. The second paper examines municipal strategic planning exercises motivated by resources as a result of decentralization in Lebanon and how city development strategies have become tools through which power struggles between political and sectarian groups are reproduced or renegotiated. The third paper examines decentralization reforms in Morocco and the use of the discourse of decentralization and good governance by Islamists in municipal elections. The last paper examines the experiences of Hamas women in municipal elections and councils in the Palestinian Authority. Together these papers provide a comprehensive examination of a range of policy types and of countries. The papers are based on recent fieldwork.
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Dr. Janine A. Clark
Authoritarian rulers have long sought to ensure the dominance of pro-regime elites in municipal elections and their continued support through various clientelist privileges (Harders 2003). Indeed, despite good governance, including, political decentralization reforms -- devolving greater powers to municipal governments -- research indicates that authoritarian rulers worldwide use economic reform as a tool to consolidate political support in order to stabilize larger regime interests (Craig and Porter 2006). Rather than redistributing power or including new voices, decentralization commonly results in elite capture. Morocco, which has implemented the most far-reaching decentralization reforms of any country in the MENA region, is no exception. Yet fieldwork in Morocco reveals that there are municipalities – albeit highly limited in number – in which local patrons have been displaced from power as a result of decentralization reforms. If, globally, regionally and nationally, decentralization has not on the whole resulted in the expected and hoped-for effects, what explains these municipalities? How were new political forces able to displace established elites from power?
This paper argues that the displacement of established elites from municipal power in municipalities occurred less as a result of the devolution of powers and resources per se, although these too are important, but as a consequence of the discourse and values within which decentralization is embedded. Good governance and decentralization provided a discourse with which new contenders for power were able to challenge local elites. More significantly, united by the language of transparency and accountability and by their civil society activities, opposition members were able to build both crucial alliances and popular support. Ideologically-diverse civil society actors thus were able to build on their mutual concerns and NGO-efforts, forge seemingly unlikely alliances, and defeat established elites in the polls.
This paper is based on an in-depth comparative study of three municipalities in Morocco, two in which elites were displaced from power and one in which established elites remain in power. The study is based on field research conducted in municipalities located throughout Morocco, representing fifty percent of the country’s regions. Interviews were conducted with mayors, councilors, civil society activists and employees of the Minister of Interior both in the municipalities and in Rabat. The field research, conducted in 2011-2012, is supplemented with primary and secondary sources.
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Dr. Marion Boulby
Hamas Women in Municipalities: Patriarchal Politics
The 2006 election of six Hamas women to the Palestinian Legislative council has attracted considerable attention from scholars (Jad, 2008, Caridi, 2012, Abou Zeid, 2006). Yet the election of Hamas women in 2004-2005 municipal elections has been given much less attention. Drawing on interviews with Hamas women in West Bank towns and villages since 2008, this paper raises two critical points about the process and outcome of these elections. First, women’s election was to be boosted by the introduction of a quota system in the Electoral Law of 2004 but in fact most women won outright because of prominence in local communities. And while this has caused some analysts (Rula Abu Daho, 2009) to see that women were overcoming patriarchal obstacles I argue that this is not the case. Rather, women have been coopted by family and hamula ties and circumscribed in performing their elected roles. Second, this paper argues that the Hamas leadership decision to involve women in municipal (as well as national) politics reflects no ideological change with regard to women’s traditional role in the eyes of Islamists (Haideh Moghassi, 1993) but rather a strategy of political expediency designed to maximize voter support as noted in the case of the Yemeni Islah group (Schwedler, 2003).
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Dr. Ellen Lust
Tunisia’s change of regime in 2011 created pressures and opportunities for political renewal not only at the national level, but at the local one as well. In the immediate aftermath of the regime fall, local councils were disbanded and, in many cases, interim councils established through impromptu measures. Subsequently, the special appointed councils, the Niyyabah Khousousiyya, were established in law, and a negotiation process between the governor and local leader to appoint members routinized. Despite the procedures, however, the experiences of council appointments varies dramatically: In some cases, they have been established relatively quickly with little contention, while in others, establishment has been thwarted and the process highly contested.
This paper examines the reasons for the different experiences, and the relative impact that the very process itself appears to have on council performance. The paper draws from quantitative analysis of a dataset that includes council formation, council size, political affiliations of mayors, and other local socio-economic factors across all municipalities in Tunisia, drawn from the Official Journal. The paper is also based on qualitative interviews with council members, governors, local civil society activists, and other elites, conducted in 2013 and 2014 in 12 municipalities. The expectations, to be supported, refuted or revised through closer analysis of data currently conducted, is that although structural factors (e.g., the size of the council, the socio-economic status of the municipality) drive much of the variation in the timing and stability of local councils, political forces also play an important role. Longer negotiations over council formation may signal greater competition of political forces.
Ironically, where such councils are formed, it may be the ones that take longer to form that actually perform better. Longer length to formation may signal the greater competition of political forces, and this may actually drive competition that incentivizes council members to perform better. The initial hypotheses underlying the second half of the paper is that councils formed through longer periods of contestation may have better performance.
The inquiry not only yields a better understanding of council formation in Tunisia, but promises to shed light on local politics more generally as well. Understanding the interplay of national, governorate, and local levels is critical for considering the impact of decentralization. So, too, is a closer analysis of the political dynamics of local councils. This paper moves these inquiries forward.
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Dr. Mona Harb
One of the mechanisms through which decentralization policies materialize at the regional and local levels is development and planning strategies. In this paper, I explore three sets of questions: How do city and development strategies become mobilized by networks of institutions and a focus of learning of local and regional governments? How do they re-assemble and re-produce territorialities? How do they impact political, economic and socio-spatial structures and relations? I undertake this investigation in an antagonistic sociopolitical context and a polarized built environment--that of Lebanon.
Over the past few years, an increasing number of municipal federations, gathering about two-thirds of Lebanese municipalities, have initiated strategic planning exercises, motivated by the influx of resources through decentralized cooperation partnerships with European countries and grants from international donors. These take place in regions either homogeneous on the sectarian level or mixed. They often engage a multiplicity of stakeholders from civil society and from the private sector.
Preliminary findings, based on observation and qualitative interviews with policy makers and elected councilors, indicate that city development strategies have become a new policy panacea in Lebanon via a network of local and international urban policy experts. They are not monolithic direct importations, but highly eclectic and variable processes of learning that negotiate different models, approaches, and technologies, and organize diverse mobilities, yielding dissimilar outcomes. Another observation relates to how these strategies become tools through which power struggles between opposing political and/or sectarian groups, often associated to real estate, economic and territorial interests are reproduced and sometimes negotiated. Regional and local governments, as well as real-estate developers and ordinary citizens are the key actors of these struggles, as they have direct access to urban planning tools through which city strategies can be maneuvered and resources geared in ways to further or challenge dominant political and economic groups, either on the intra-sectarian or inter-sectarian levels.
