Citizen Petitions to Moroccan Municipalities: A Case of Asymmetrical Inclusion?

• In Event: Power and Promotion: Local Governance in the MENA

Abstract

In Morocco, the new Constitution of 2011 put in motion the so-called “advanced regionalisation” process, emphasizing the participatory nature of democracy in Morocco. This included granting a new right to the citizens to petition municipalities for the addition of a topic to the agenda of the following municipal council meeting. So far, this right has been claimed in around 200 instances. The majority of the petitionary initiatives are related to the organisation of library services, development of the local cultural centres, increase in services for the youth, construction of roads and planning of urban spaces. Issues related to access to public space are a recurring object of petitionary initiatives as well, but predominantly in urban municipalities. The official rhetoric emphasizes that the right to submit petitions at the local levels aims at a greater political inclusion of citizens in the management of the municipality they inhabit. However, in practice, the progressive shrinkage of municipalities’ political prerogatives and the persistence of weak governance in their management (including corruption, lack of transparency and lack of trust) represent hurdles in the inclusion of citizens in the municipality’s policy process. This paper will focus on the factors that affect the way in which the right to petition is seized by Moroccan citizens and how it varies across different municipalities.

This paper will present findings from fieldwork conducted in late 2018, and additional fieldwork to be conducted in early 2020. The sample for data collection in 2020 will be two municipalities (one rural and one urban) in the North and two in the South. Municipalities in the north have participated in donor-led programs on the use of petitions, while municipalities in the south are in peripheral (and often marginalised) regions in which there is less influence of international donors and different citizens’ demands. The methodology includes semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders at the national and at the local level, as well as focus groups with citizens that either exercised their right to petition to the municipality or did not.

We will use this data to explore how the inclusion of citizens in local governance through the right to petition is contingent on the exercise of this right, and whether petitioning is exercised by a specific ‘profile’ of (either individual or collective) citizens or by all citizens equally. We will also analyse how differences in room for autonomous governance of municipalities negatively impacts citizens’ participation in local governance.

We seek to (qualitatively) assess the relative weight of the following factors on the exercise of the right to petition in Morocco:

H1: The recurrent ‘profile’ of those who seize the right to petition is likely to be those associated more with ‘modernity’ including the upper/middle class, the highly educated, those active in local civil society, etc. and the parallel exclusion of other segments of the local population is likely to be associated with those who are low-income workers, living in informality, outside of formal politics, etc..
H2: We expect that the relative lack of use of petitions in rural and peripheral municipalities compared to urban and central municipalities is matched by more limited autonomy and prerogatives, as well as inadequate resources, for self-governance in rural and peripheral municipalities.

By underlining the risk of channelling citizens’ demands into a procedural and depoliticised process that dissociates them from the development of solutions to their problems, this paper suggests that the institutionalisation of participatory policies at the local level has to be accompanied by a concrete devolution of political autonomy to local governments.

Authors

• Sylvia Bergh, Erasmus University Rotterdam

• Francesco Colin