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Summary

Since the 2011 revolution, Tunisia has taken several steps to devolve power from the highly centralized structures run by the Ben Ali family to the new, democratic central government and then from the executive to the parliament. Today, Tunisia faces the crucial task of shifting power from the national to the local level. This decentralization of power has the potential to address long-standing issues of dramatic regional disparity in the healthcare and education sectors, as well as in poverty and infrastructure.

The Opportunities of Decentralization

• If done right, decentralization will empower local actors to make decisions regarding their municipalities and regions that lead to real changes for their constituents.
• This could introduce a new political class, which would be outside the country’s traditionally dominant political parties and could provide more opportunities for women and youth to enter politics.
• Decentralization should also improve service delivery at the local level—where poor performance since the 2011 revolution has resulted in mistrust between citizens and the state as well as low tax revenues.
• Decentralization requires strong political will—from officials in the central government, who must willingly give up some of their own power and demonstrate their commitment to participatory governance at the local level; and from local officials who must build trust with their constituents, provide opportunities for citizen engagement, and prevent the re-creation of ineffective institutions at the local level.

What Can Be Done?

• The Tunisian government can manage public expectations by communicating clearly about the devolution of administrative and financial power.
• It can provide opportunities for participatory governance outside of those mandated by the law, such as the creation of citizen councils or regular policy preference surveys.
• The national government should also provide adequate financial and human resources, including ensuring the distribution of tax revenue to the local level.
• Civil society must continue to guard the democratic process. But it has an even more important role to play at the local level to encourage and ingrain a culture of participatory democracy by conducting an outreach campaign to the public regarding decentralization.
• It can help connect citizens with participatory governance mechanisms and devise mechanisms to capture citizen preferences and communicate those preferences to local officials.
• International donors should work to enhance the ability of local (and national) grassroots organizations and networks to encourage participatory governance.
• Additionally, donors should continue to fund e-government efforts, including the digitization of local government forms and processes, to create a one-stop shop for citizens to access municipal services and communicate with municipal officials.
• Donors must also train and equip local officials based on best practices from around the globe.

Introduction

Tunisia’s May 6, 2018, municipal elections, the country’s first-ever democratic local elections, constitute an important step that will move the country closer toward fully consolidating its democratic transition. By democratically electing 7,200 local officials who will represent 350 municipalities, Tunisians will signal their commitment to democracy. But these elections are only one small piece of a much larger decentralization program, whose fate is uncertain. Elections will be meaningless without a strong legal framework for decentralization that clearly delineates power and responsibility between the national and local levels. The process will also require the political will to implement decentralization at both the national and local levels.

On paper, Tunisia has had local governance for some time, with municipal and regional authorities empowered to make some, albeit mostly administrative, decisions. However, the decentralization practiced since Tunisia’s independence in 1956 has been “just pure fiction” according to Tunisian scholar Neji Baccouche.¹ In reality, the political system was highly centralized under both presidents Habib Bourguiba and Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a “political choice which addressed the need of rebuilding a united state which was able to fight against an ancient tribal system,” as Baccouche put it.² Most local authorities were appointed by the central state, and they reported to the feared Ministry of the Interior.

Local actors who exhibited any sort of political independence were summarily dealt with by a central state that retained authority to replace councils with their own handpicked officials. The official in charge of Tunisia’s post-2011 decentralization process, Mokhtar Hammami, explained it this way: “The main dilemma that we faced [when starting the decentralization process] was the dominance of the central system, which . . . turned [the municipalities] into dependent facilities and stripped them of their powers. [This centralization] created an expensive bureaucracy and distorted the image of the municipalities.”³ Additionally, regions and municipalities were created based largely on security concerns to divide problematic areas, and the division of territory was “used to impose the authority of the central state over the entire territory.” Thus, “many [regions] were created in exceptional circumstances regardless of development requirements.”⁴ Furthermore, “the role of municipalities was limited to classic services such as waste collection and urban planning. The vital services related to the basic needs of citizens, such as health and education, were outside their authority, which contributed to the weakening of municipalities and the lack of confidence in this structure.”⁵

Tunisia’s decentralization process has the potential to reinvigorate the democratic transition by empowering local actors, improving service delivery, injecting new energy and ideas into the policy process at the local level, and alleviating some pressure on the central government. But the process must provide long-term systemic changes to governance and fiscal authority as well as demonstrate short-term wins, particularly in the country’s traditionally disadvantaged interior regions. Decentralization’s success depends on it.

Goals and Benefits of Decentralization

Globally, decentralization is believed to have several positive effects, from increasing government efficiency and reducing corruption to improving the relationship between citizens and the state. Officials who are physically closer to the people and live among them can more easily identify their needs, leading to more efficient public services. This is a virtuous cycle in which better and more transparent service provision leads to higher tax collection rates, which in turn lead to more money in the coffers to provide even better services.⁶ As some scholars have noted, “Decentralization, and in particular devolution will plausibly improve accountability and governance by bringing government closer to the people.”⁷ And as Tunisian Minister of Local Affairs and the Environment Riadh Mouaker said, “Decentralization, if successful, will become the key driver of local development.”⁸

Decentralization also offers the opportunity to experiment and try out different policies. Because policy change is far easier at the local level and needs and resources vary by municipality, decentralization can allow policymakers to evaluate what types of programs and initiatives are most effective and where. Furthermore, national-level bureaucrats and politicians are often more risk-averse than their local-level counterparts; thus, local governments can be more creative in developing policy solutions to local issues. While not all creative solutions are successful, local officials may be more willing to try new ideas, which, if successful, could be replicated elsewhere.

Yet for decentralization to be successful, it requires a tremendous amount of preparation as well as certain institutional and psychological conditions.

Aside from the overarching plan of devolving administrative and financial power from the central state to the localities, Tunisia’s decentralization efforts have three other goals: to ensure a more equitable distribution of resources; to empower local actors to make decisions for their communities; and to improve service delivery across the country.

But for decentralization to be successful, it requires a tremendous amount of preparation as well as certain institutional and psychological conditions. The most important precondition is political will and vision, particularly from the central government. A central government that either attempts decentralization half-heartedly or actively undermines the process will produce failed policies.

In addition to a legal framework and the institutional structures aligned with the newly devolved functions, the decentralization program must be backed by significant financial and human resources at both the central and local levels. There must be some form of interbureaucratic management procedures to both ensure accountability and prevent a duplication of efforts. And there must be some form of societal dialogue—at the national and local levels—to invest the public in the process. The public, through civil society organizations and informal networks as well as direct participatory processes, plays a crucial role in providing oversight and accountability.

Distributing Resources Equitably

Currently, Tunisia suffers from dramatic regional disparities on virtually all indicators (see table 1). In 2013, eighteen municipalities (including Tunis and its suburbs of La Marsa, La Goulette, Sidi Bou Said, and Carthage) held 51 percent of the state’s municipal budget, while 246 municipalities held the remaining 49 percent.⁹ A study by the International Labor Organization in June 2017 found dramatic inequality in various regions when comparing the poverty rates, purchasing power, and quality and proximity of public services.¹⁰ In the Ben Ali regime’s final budget before it fell, 82 percent of state funds were dedicated to coastal areas, compared to only 18 percent for the interior.

Furthermore, in the past, more than 50 percent of the territory was “non-municipalized,” so that more than one-third of the country’s population lived outside of a municipal district and therefore had no ability to elect local officials.¹¹ To ensure every citizen resides in a municipality, the government created eighty-six new municipalities and expanded the territory of several others. Additionally, one of the key pillars of Tunisia’s decentralization process is to correct regional disparities through the process of “positive discrimination.”¹² This process is intended to provide for equitable (rather than equal) resource distribution (from state budget support to administrative and human resources) that will eventually level the playing field for all Tunisians, regardless of where they live.

Positive discrimination is enshrined in the 2014 constitution (in article 12), but it is not a new concept in Tunisia. Tax incentives and investment bonuses for regional development have been in place since the 1970s.¹³ However, the decentralization process is framed, in large part, as a way to sustainably correct the

Citizens in Tunisia’s traditionally marginalized regions hope that decentralization will bring more attention to their regions. As a civil society activist in Sidi Bouzid noted, as of early 2018 there are no national ministers or highly ranked officials from Sidi Bouzid.¹⁴ This contributes to the alienation and physical and psychological distance from the center. One resident of the Siliana Governorate, who is running in the municipal elections in the town of Kesra, said he is hopeful that decentralization will bring improvements to his town because “people will be elected who will respond to the needs and voices of citizens,” unlike the current officials who are inexperienced and take their direction from Tunis.¹⁵ The newly elected municipal council will likely have more legitimacy, he said, in part because the members are elected but also because they will “understand the reality of the region.”¹⁶ While decentralization will likely not correct the problem of having local interests represented at the national level in Tunis, it will provide the opportunity for Sidi Bouzid’s citizens to make decisions about Sidi Bouzid and Siliana’s citizens to make decisions about Siliana.

Residents of Kesra echoed the issue of visibility, hopeful that decentralization will provide them with the chance to show off their region to other Tunisians.¹⁷ Few Tunisians—let alone foreigners—are aware of Kesra, which is the highest elevated town in Tunisia and is home to tremendous biodiversity, historical sites, and tourism potential. While tourism increased in Kesra after the revolution, the tourism and agricultural sectors remain vastly underdeveloped.

The decentralization process is framed as a way to sustainably correct the long-standing regional disparities by prioritizing certain regions over others.

According to another candidate for local elections in Kesra, decentralization there has purely developmental goals.¹⁸ Siliana is one of the marginalized governorates of the country. Advocates for decentralization there hope it will increase economic development through better allocation of resources to the agricultural and tourism sectors. The candidate said he has a vision for how to improve the tourism industry, how to address pollution, and how to upgrade the town’s agricultural industry so it becomes an example for organic farming, but he needs financial resources and administrative and political independence to carry it out.¹⁹

Empowering Local Actors

According to the World Bank, one of the primary goals of decentralization is to make municipalities “more active players in the planning, implementation and delivery of municipal infrastructure and services.”²⁰ Some analysts have noted that local government is more responsive due to access to better information as well as stronger incentives, than central government.²¹ Noted Ghanaian scholar Joseph Ayee wrote that decentralization in his country “awakened the spirit of voluntarism and ‘awareness’ among most sections of the communities.” It led to “incremental access of people living in previously neglected rural areas to central government resources and institutions” and “created a huge number of opportunities for mostly young people who aspired to a career in politics.”²²

Decentralization can also bring job opportunities for unemployed youth, particularly those with degrees in management or policy who can take on new roles as local bureaucrats. And the new local leadership will give women and youth the opportunity to be part of the political decisionmaking process. As one Tunisian civil society activist noted, even when they are active members of their political party, women and youth are often “discarded” when they try to run for national office.²³ The law governing the municipal elections tries to address this issue, stipulating that municipal and regional councils must have gender parity. That’s to be achieved by alternating between men and women on each candidate list with parity among heads of lists for parties with more than one list.²⁴ And each list must include someone under age thirty-five among the first three candidates.²⁵ As a result, over 75 percent of registered candidates are under forty-five and more than 50 percent are under thirty-five.²⁶

Improving Service Delivery

Globally, decentralization has been shown to improve efficiency in the use of public resources as well as increase competition for public resources.²⁷ In Porto Alegre, Brazil, for example, access to basic water, sewage treatment, and elementary and secondary school enrollment nearly doubled between 1989 and 1996, and the city increased revenue collection by 48 percent.²⁸ In Bolivia, decentralization resulted in a massive shift in public resources favoring smaller and poorer municipalities. There, public investment in education, water treatment, and sanitation rose in three-quarters of all municipalities, representing a shift from large-scale production to social needs.²⁹

According to civil society actors working on decentralization, Tunisians would most like improvements to already existing services, such as street lighting, waste collection, construction and quality of roads as well as local transport.³⁰ Citizens in Tunisia’s traditionally disadvantaged regions are particularly hopeful on this score.

Improving service delivery has numerous secondary effects as well. It helps to rebuild the trust between citizens and their elected officials. According to a November 2017 survey by the International Republican Institute, 57 percent of Tunisians rated the performance of the government as “very bad” or “somewhat bad.” And 67 percent said the ministries do “nothing at all” to address the needs of people like them, while 73 percent said the same of parliament.³¹

Globally, decentralization has been shown to improve efficiency in the use of public resources as well as increase competition for public resources.

Additionally, there is some research that suggests that fiscal decentralization can reduce corruption.³²—people can identify the centers of power and how to communicate with them. This is “highly symbolic,” as one activist put it, but easy to achieve.³³ Currently, Tunisians receive very little communication from their municipalities. According to a 2015 World Bank survey, only 3 percent of respondents had received any form of communication from their municipality during the previous year.³⁴ Part of the issue is digital infrastructure—many municipalities do not have functioning websites, so municipal officers must use their personal Facebook pages to communicate.³⁵ Furthermore, many municipalities do not have a communications officer, and others have only one or two staff members to cover all issues in an entire municipality. Thus, there is a need for a dramatic increase in local staffing.

Another secondary effect of better service delivery is that it can help make municipalities—particularly those in the interior—more attractive to foreign donors and the private sector. For example, there remain dramatic disparities in the road conditions between Tunis in the north and the southern and northwestern regions. Driving south from Tunis, the highway is in good condition to Kairouan, about 100 miles. However, the route then becomes unpredictable—turning at times into a dirt road and at other times into a pristine highway. And due to poor road conditions, the drive southwest from Tunis to Siliana, about 80 miles away, takes longer than the drive from Washington, DC, to Philadelphia, which is nearly twice as far.

There is some research that suggests that fiscal decentralization can reduce corruption: by creating more direct links between citizens and authorities, there is more transparency.

Finally, decentralization can also help remove the bureaucratic bottlenecks and red tape that tend to delay decisionmaking, frustrating citizens and encouraging corruption.³⁶ In this regard, decentralization is beneficial to not only local leaders but also national officials, who, by delegating the routine tasks of governing to local officials, are free to focus on statewide policymaking.³⁷

Challenges of Decentralization

Yet there are numerous challenges—structural, logistical, and psychological—that decentralization in Tunisia continues to face. The biggest logistical chal­lenge is that the Code des Collectivités Locales (Local Authorities Code), the law governing the entire decentralization process (Organic Law No. 48 of 2017), was only passed by parliament on April 26, 2018—just ten days ahead of the municipal elections.³⁸

Numerous civil society activists expressed dismay that the law would not be completed far enough in advance of the elections process for candidates to understand what their roles would be and for the Tunisian voting public to digest what they were voting for. The new law, which is one of the longest and most com­plex in Tunisia’s history, replaces the 1975 law on municipal governance. The old law gave local officials “neither real authority nor real administrative and financial autonomy,” according to Tunisian journalist Hayfa Dhouib.³⁹

A further structural challenge is that eighty-six new municipalities (out of 350 total) were created during the decentralization process, and so far they are only “ink on paper.”⁴⁰ In fact, 18 percent of Tunisians are in a brand new municipality, while 58 percent are in extended municipalities.⁴¹ While some of these new municipalities were split from larger municipalities and therefore already had functioning staff, offices, and budgets, it will be difficult to staff all 350 municipalities and create a culture of community in the short term. As a civil society activist in Sidi Bouzid noted of that mostly rural region, it is very challenging to put the physical systems in place to allow for close contact between local officials and the citizenry.⁴²

Finally, the decentralization process is a lengthy endeavor—the government estimates twenty-seven years to fully devolve power to local officials and to bring the most poorly performing municipalities on par with the rest of the country—that risks running out of steam. One participant in a Carnegie-organized workshop noted a fear of partial decentralization. The failure to decentralize fully would create confusion and hinder accountability in both the local and central governments.⁴³ Partial decentralization has been an issue in some cases around the world. In Brazil, Pakistan, and South Africa, local authorities were given administrative powers but not fiscal powers, depriving them of the ability to enact their policy decisions.

Managing Expectations

In conversations with officials and civil society activists in and out of Tunis, it is clear that expectations vary widely for what decentralization will bring to the country. Tunisia’s traditionally marginalized interior regions have some of the highest expectations for decentralization—that it will level the playing field and provide a more equitable distribution of resources. But these outcomes are not guaranteed. Even under a system of positive discrimination, taxation and distribution of resources might remain unaffected because “certain local areas will find it much easier to raise significant tax revenue than others” due to natural resources, infrastructure, and other issues that do not magically change with decentralization.⁴⁴ In Ghana, only those who lived in larger towns or had special political influence were successful in developing their regions. Decentralization was seen as more of a public relations move than reality, and the political will to enforce change suffered as a result. Conversely, Uganda succeeded where Ghana did not, due to proper coordination among ministries (led by an office within the presidency) and building capacity at the district level (carried out by district staff who had been trained by external trainers).⁴⁵

Tunisia’s traditionally marginalized interior regions have some of the highest expectations for decentralization, but the outcomes are not guaranteed.

Part of managing expectations is that, as a report by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) noted, “the benefits of devolution may take years to accrue, but the costs are front-loaded.”⁴⁶ The Local Affairs Ministry’s twenty-seven-year plan is laudable and was created after years of preparation—from workshops and seminars around the country to consultations with international experts from twelve countries.⁴⁷ However, it is not clear what short-term wins decentralization will provide for residents in the interior. A delegate in Sidi Bouzid noted that decentralization is a slow process that will take a decade. Thus expectations shouldn’t be too high—“it won’t bring miracles,” he said.⁴⁸

In conversations with individuals in the interior regions, it was not clear what change they want to see in the short term, other than local control over their affairs. While that is a realistic goal, it will not guarantee the economic development needed by Tunisia’s traditionally marginalized municipalities. As other cases have shown, centralized governments are more effective than local governments at redistributing wealth and alleviating economic disparities. Thus, once decentralization moves forward, and the central government’s power to intervene locally decreases, the ability of the central government to level the playing field across regions might similarly decrease.

Officials, politicians, and civil society should also manage the public’s expectations regarding decentralization’s ability to provide improved governance. Ahlem Hachicha Chaker, executive director of the Policy Institute of the Machrou Tounes Party, noted that the public has high expectations that municipal elections will improve citizen participation. Through municipal elections, “the elector chooses, in a direct way, the people who represent him locally [and] manage public affairs on his behalf.”⁴⁹ But, she argues, “I think we are making these elections more meaningful than they are. We want to believe that these elections will solve all the problems of society, that they correspond to an ‘instant democracy,’ that they will bring this new model of much sought-after governance”—results that are highly unlikely.⁵⁰

Building Political Will