03/20/2011
03/17/2011
Morocco: Democracy-Building and Sustainable Development
With socio-revolutionary movements in North Africa and the Middle East and governments in the region seeking to identify and implement viable models for political reform and development, Morocco is fortunate to have been raising public awareness during the past two years about its decentralization plan. Morocco’s approach to promoting both democracy and development – which King Mohammed VI often discusses and did right after the nation-wide protests of February 20th – is to wed the two together so that each is advanced by way of the other. In practice, this means that Moroccan people at the local level are to engage in participatory democratic planning and managing of development initiatives that are intended to benefit them. Moroccan sustainable development is to occur through democratic exchanges and consensus-building, and democracy is to be built during the process of creating sustainable development. Decentralization, which transfers managerial authority, skills, and capacities to sub-national levels, is Morocco’s chosen framework to synergistically advance democracy and development from the bottom-up.
Considering Morocco’s stated goal of decentralization, it follows that its organizational arrangement emphasizes the “participatory method.” This democratic approach is to be applied by local communities together assessing their development challenges and opportunities, and creating and implementing action plans that reflect their shared priorities, such as job creation, education, health, and the environment. Since 2010, the Charter of Communes in Morocco (Morocco is composed of approximately 1,500 Communes that make up the most local administrative tier) mandates that communities’ own development plans be created and submitted to the ministries of Interior and Finance. Based on studies by the World Bank, USAID, UN development agencies, and numerous others, the participatory method is becoming understood to be the sine qua non of sustainable development because people’s participation in the determination of projects intended to benefit them provides the needed incentives for local people to maintain them.
