This study analyzes how the institutional arrangements among the central government and elected local agencies shape outcomes in local governance settings among emerging democracies. Despite implementing comprehensive decentralization laws, emerging democracies often achieve limited success in making local governance more inclusive for citizens and elected stakeholders. A potential factor limiting the inclusiveness is the disinclination of mayors to cooperate with the local stakeholders, or what can be termed as elite capture. What factors influence the inclination of mayors to cooperate, and what are their implications for transparent forms of governance? I answer these questions through a case study of Tunisia, where the local governance is struggling with clientelism and mass resignations of local council members following the implementation of the 2018 Municipal Law. I evaluate on the mechanisms that produce divergent inclinations of cooperation among mayors based on a set of qualitative data recently collected among 39 municipalities through interviews with mayors, city council members, civil society and a governor in socio-economically divergent governorates of El Kef, Gabes, Monastir, Sfax, Tunis and Ariana. I evaluate on their implications for transparency based on a Transparency Index developed by an Independent Civil Society Organization (al-Bawsala) in Tunisia for all 350 municipalities. The findings from interviews suggest that partisanship ties constitute the most substantive factor perpetuating hierarchical relations among the elected officials and the appointed bureaucrats, as they can enable mayors to focus on large scale projects through partisan engagement at the expense of cooperative modes of governance at the local level. The ties of mayors to the former regime do not generate much exclusion, as they do not generate the political capital sufficient enough for mayors to close down upon the vertical relations at the local level. A mixed model analysis on the Transparency Index of municipalities within governorates where the partisanship ties are identified (n=174) indicates that the transparency score is lower in instances where an ideological overlap exists among the partisan affiliations of mayors and governors. In contrast, the score is higher when mayors and governors come from the opposite ideological backgrounds. In explaining the results, I argue that despite the volatile electoral environment in Tunisia partisan and ideological bondage provides the voluntary networks that internalize the externality deriving from the transaction costs of the hierarchical institutions.

In the south and central regions of Tunisia an important means of colonial penetration and capital accumulation was the adoption and alteration of the tribal myaad system. Traditionally an informal institution for conflict resolution and resource allocation, the myaad was perfectly suited to provide the French, and later, post-independence governments, with a veneer of local legitimacy through which to control both land and people. Coopted and formalized as a legal entity under French colonial policy and renamed conseils de gestion (French) or majales al tassaruf (Arabic), these tribal/management councils (T/MCs) ensured the compliance of local communities in the service of successive central authorities by endowing them with ostensible control over vast areas of collective, tribal lands through local ‘representatives’ of each of the major clans nominally ‘elected’—though in practice vetted, approved and often directly selected, by the central authorities. Initially, the T/MC was used as a mechanism for sedentarization and securitization under French colonial rule (1881-1956) in areas where tribes were historically powerful and posed a threat to colon interests. However, the Bourguiba (1956-1987), Ben Ali (1987-2011), and post-“Arab Spring” (2011-) governments increasingly used the T/MCs for their own designs, most significantly to privatize land previously designated as ‘collective’ in what today amounts to particular forms of accumulation by dispossession and extracivism. The purpose of this paper is to present the role of T/MCs in the social transformation of the people and communities of the south and central regions of Tunisia from the Ottoman period to the present. My aim is to demonstrate the ways in which a traditional informal institution that maintained the cohesiveness of the tribal social formation was coopted as a system of local governance that was used to ultimately undermine it. Research for this paper draws from three years of qualitative fieldwork and compares the processes of local governance in select districts of Tunisia’s Nefzaoua region: Kebili, Douz, Zaafrane, Jemna, and Golaa.

This paper examines the redrawing of municipal boundaries in Tunisia in 2014-19, a far-reaching reform that has amended the boundaries of 187 existing municipalities out of a total of 264 and created 86 new municipalities. The paper examines how Tunisia’s decentralization reforms designed to empower local actors create new conflicts over space and what implications these conflicts have for municipalities’ capacity to govern their territory. Based on over a year of fieldwork in three regions of Tunisia, the paper analyzes the various logics driving the process of drawing municipal boundaries and maps the roles and relations of the actors involved, including politicians, bureaucrats, business actors, experts, international donors and civil society organizations. It then juxtaposes the logics of decision-makers with those of local actors through case studies of four municipalities whose boundary changes have been deeply contested. It argues that municipal boundaries in Tunisia have largely been drawn on the basis of two logics - a centralized administrative logic that views boundary-drawing as a technical exercise to be carried out by the central state based on “scientific criteria”, and a clientelistic logic based on an exchange of interests with business actors, particularly real estate developers. While there has been a growing literature on decentralization in the Arab world, the drawing of territorial boundaries of municipal authorities, the basic units of decentralization, receives little attention. This is despite the fact that acts of boundary-making have significant sociological, political and economic consequences for local governance. The way in which boundaries are drawn empowers some geographical areas or groups while marginalizing others. The act of recognizing an area as a municipality provided a means of access to state grants, credits, and equipment, as well as symbolic value. Particularistic relations have historically played an important role in decisions to draw new boundaries, with municipalities created in areas where local leaders enjoyed privileged relations with the head of state (Turki and Gana 2015, 56).

What do newly established municipalities, in localities previously managed by rural councils, make visible about the materialities of the local state in post-revolution Tunisia? In this presentation, I share my ethnography of the newly established municipalities of El Fouar, Rjim Maatoug in the governorate of Kebili, and Hazoua in the governorate of Tozeur. These municipalities created in the context of Tunisia’s municipalization program are all located at the frontier – a literal frontier where a vast uninhabited desert slowly encroached on human habitation, a political frontier with a neighboring sovereign country, Algeria, and a socio-spatial frontier of state-remaking after revolution. I argue that at this frontiers, municipalities enact space-state making, technologies of rule rooted in colonial and post-colonial histories of governing the frontier.