This paper will contribute to the overall theme of the panel by analyzing the politics around the municipal elections in Morocco, due to be held in June 2009. The author plans to conduct field research in a rural area during the campaign and during the elections, and observe ‘local politics’ and the interplay between formal and informal institutions in action. The paper would build on the author’s recent doctoral research on local governance in Morocco which included in-depth interviews with local councillors. The paper will first provide some background about past municipal elections in Morocco and recent reforms with regard to decentralized local authorities and elections laws. It will also briefly review the available literature on local politics and the interaction between formal and informal institutions, both from a theoretical as well as Morocco-specific perspective (including Herzenni (2000), Venema and Mguild (2002), and Graefe (2005)). The study by Hamimaz (2003) in particular is useful in proposing the notion of the “tribal” syndrome in explaining how local election campaigns in Morocco have contributed to intra and inter-tribal conflicts. The main part of the paper will be devoted to an analysis of the election campaign itself, which includes the communication used by candidates, the role of political parties at the local level, the meaning of party membership and programs for local councillors and candidates, and their interaction with voters and tribal (informal) institutions. Given that these elections for the first time include a quota for female councillors, the paper will examine the proposed themes from a gender perspective as well; i.e. the socio-economic background of female candidates, whether their campaigns highlight women’s issues in particular, how their communication strategies differ from those of men, how they are selected by their communities to stand for elections, and what formal and informal institutions constrain or facilitate their campaigns, among others. The conclusion will summarize the main findings and explore their implications with regard to the decentralisation process as well as the capacity-building programs for candidates and politicians provided by local NGOs and donors in the context of democracy promotion in Morocco.

The prevailing dynamic developments on local level within the MENA region are indeed rooted and organized in the frame of informal spaces, but they also exemplify how intricate interrelations between formal and informal spaces of local politics are in this region. Local governance structures in MENA countries are characterized by a specific coexistence of informal structures, such as tribal and family networks, and formal institutional arrangements, such as local councils. This paper will contribute to the question of how local politics is organized in Amman and Ma’an by focussing on the interdependences of formal and informal institutions as well as on the relation between state and societal actors. In doing so, the paper seeks to highlight state-society-relations in Jordan in order to contribute to the understanding of mechanisms of authoritarian stability from ‘below’. Subsequently, the paper analyzes if and how these interactions are affected by decentralization programs. The hypothesis of this paper is that local informal structures as well as new modes of interactions between local governments and private actors in the frame of decentralization do not implicate any shift in local power structures. In contrary, informal institutions and state-societal interactions frequently contribute to the stability of authoritarian regimes from ‘below’. The paper will follow up with the discussion about informal spaces and employs a wide concept of participation that includes formal, informal as well as ‘invisible’ participation modes. It will be based on Migdal’s theoretical state-in-society approach and on the governance concept. Based on first empirical field studies, the next chapter will provide a mapping of local actors and institutions in a comparative perspective between Amman and Ma’an. It will be shown that the local level encompasses a variety of different (new) societal actors who increasingly demand opportunities of “co-governance”. The subsequent chapter analyzes these new demands by embedding them into the context of decentralization processes and discourses in Jordan. The paper concludes stating that these demands indeed encourage an incremental opening up of limited spaces resulting in the establishment of new governance institutions, but these new structures have not been the result of local struggles, but a decision from “above”. By integrating private actors into new governance institutions, authoritarian regimes seek to legitimate these institutions and to control actors and processes.

Local Politics and local activism have long been neglected by conventional political sciences as the discipline mostly focuses on formal institutions and national elites. Wrongly enough: Recent events as the strikes in the Egyptian provincial town of Mahalla that occurred in combination with a bread crisis disrupted the authoritarian routine as did the strike of April 2008. In other cases, local residents fought the police while being forcedly removed from their land in Cairo and people in Dumyiat struggle against the construction of a polluting new industrial site. The paper holds, that Egypt as many other Arab countries is facing huge social, economic and cultural transformations which become visible as LOCAL phenomena. These far-reaching processes of change often escape the view of political scientists who focus on the regime and the possibilities of regime change. The paper argues that authoritarian modernization as well as the erosion of “traditional” patterns of power become most visible on the local level. The following paper addresses some of these problems using the example of the local elections in Egypt in a comparative perspective. I will first present the theoretical framework needed fort he analysis of „the „every day state“ as Salwa Ismail (2006) calls it. This includes qualitative network analysis as well as Bourdieus’ concept of social and cultural capital. The paper will then present the macro-political context of Egyptian authoritarianism under Mubarak. The paper draws on empirical material from 1996/7 and 2008. Through comparing structurally similar events – the local elections – it addresses the following questions: How are state-society-relations spelled out throughout the local elections? What are the differences between the elections of 1997 and 2008? Which state and societal actors are interacting in the local space of different Cairene neighbourhoods? How do they interact in the struggles over local hegemony? Which discourses shape local politics? Did these patterns of local politics change over the last 20 years? And if so, why and what are the reasons for and directions of change? In concluding the paper will relate these empirical question to the broader question of understanding the Arab state from a local perspective.