1st Edition

The Redeployment of State Power in the Southern Mediterranean Implications of Neoliberal Reforms for Local Governance

Edited By Sylvia I. Bergh Copyright 2013
    160 Pages
    by Routledge

    156 Pages
    by Routledge

    The effects of neoliberal economic reforms in the Southern Mediterranean are now widely regarded as a main underlying cause of the Arab uprisings. An often neglected dimension is that of the reforms’ implications for local governance. The contributions to this edited volume examine how state power is being re-articulated but also challenged at sub-national levels in Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon and Turkey. They explore the effects of neoliberal economic and local governance reforms such as decentralization, public-private partnerships, and outsourcing in the area of public service delivery, poverty alleviation, and labor market reforms on local patronage networks, public accountability, and state-society relations. The findings show that such reforms are often subordinated to established patterns of political contestation among actors who seize on the opportunities that reforms offer to advance their political agendas, thereby illustrating the local specificity of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’.

    The book thus fills an important knowledge gap by combining public policy and management theories with those on patron-client networks and public accountability at the local level, and situating them within the critical literature on neoliberalism.

    This book was published as a special issue of Mediterranean Politics.

    1. Introduction: Researching the effects of neoliberal reforms on local governance in the Southern Mediterranean, by Sylvia I. Bergh (International Institute of Social Studies/ Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

    2. Neoliberal Reform and Socio-Structural Reconfiguration in Cairo’s Popular Quarters: The Rise of the Lesser Notables in Misr Al Qadima, by Mohamed Fahmy Menza, (The American University in Cairo, Egypt)

    3. The Neoliberal Transformation of Local Government in Turkey and the Contracting Out of Municipal Services: Implications for Public Accountability, by Zeynep Kadirbeyoğlu (Department of Political Science and International Relations, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey) and Bilgesu Sümer (Department of International Relations, Yüzüncü Yıl University, Van, Turkey)

    4. Municipalities Go to Market: Economic Reform and Political Contestation in Jordan, by Janine A. Clark (Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Canada)

    5. Water Privatization Dynamics in Morocco: A Critical Assessment of the Casablancan Case, by Mohamed Said Saadi (Higher Institute of Commerce and Business Administration (ISCAE), Casablanca, Morocco)

    6. The Private Sector and Local Elites: The Experience of Public–Private Partnership in the Water Sector in Tripoli, Lebanon, by Christèle Allès (Le Groupe de Recherches et d'Etudes sur la Méditerranée et le Moyen Orient (GREMMO), University of Lyon 2, France and L’Institut français du Proche-Orient (IFPO), Beirut, Lebanon)

    7. ‘Inclusive’ Neoliberalism, Local Governance Reforms and the Redeployment of State Power: The Case of the National Initiative for Human Development (INDH) in Morocco, by Sylvia I. Bergh (International Institute of Social Studies/ Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands)

    8. Conflicting Articulations of Citizenship under a Neoliberal State Project: The Contested Implementation of the Israeli Workfare Programme, by Asa Maron (Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)

    Biography

    Sylvia I. Bergh is a Swedish national, working since 2007 as Senior Lecturer in Development Management and Governance at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. She holds a D.Phil. in Development Studies from the University of Oxford and has worked for the World Bank in Washington D.C. and Morocco.

    The scholarly analysis of what is happening in the wake of the political protests in the Arab World in 2011 is just beginning to emerge. This book, being one of the first, focuses on how the state is being reconfigured at the local level. As such, it goes beyond the conventional focus on regime change at the national level. It is empirically rich and is a valuable contribution to the academic and policy communities interested in local governance.

    Goran Hyden, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Political Science, University of Florida, U.S.A.

    This book is an important contribution to understanding the dynamics of public service reform in the Southern Mediterranean. Its special contribution is that it addresses the political effects of what appear to be only managerial reforms: decentralization, performance incentives, contracting out and privatization. Fascinatingly, it shows how such neo-liberal reforms – far from threatening established interests – are adopted by existing national and local elites and incorporated into new patronage networks and political alliances. Despite the stasis that this implies, the book argues that these localized reforms also fuelled the resistance to state power at sub-national level that characterized the Arab uprising.

    Richard Batley, Emeritus Professor, International Development Department, School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, U.K.

    This volume is a significant contribution to our understanding of local politics in the Southern Mediterranean, and to the political economy of local governance in an era of neoliberal reform. Unlike the vast majority of work on the effects of economic reform in the Arab world, which focuses almost exclusively on national or regional level phenomena, Bergh and her colleagues skilfully unpack the ways in which transnational processes of economic globalization and marketization shape political dynamics at the local level in settings that range from rural Morocco to cosmopolitan Cairo to municipalities in Turkey.  The result is a set of empirically rich and theoretically sophisticated studies that deserve to be widely read.  

    Dr Steven Heydemann, Senior Adviser for Middle East Initiatives, United States Institute for Peace (USIP), U.S.A.