Local government policy and reform context

SmartGov has conducted a scoping mission to Jordan on April 1 2021, the mission was to understand the Jordanian context, it’s reform and governance system and map the ongoing civic engagement and digitalization initiatives, thus to generate a comprehensive report that will be useful when developing projects related to governance reform and digitalization.

In Jordan, there are municipal traditions going back to the end of the 19th century where the Ottoman Law of the municipalities in 1877 established town councils in important towns and villages. The current regulation of the municipal system originates from 1955 when the first municipalities law was enacted. Since then, the law has been amended many times (1994, 2001, 2007, 2011, and 2015). While the 1955 law gave, municipalities extended mandates including health and education services, more recent laws are perceived to have limited municipal roles by taking away the health and education services. The 2015 law added functions on strategic planning and local development

 and coordination functions with competence authorities on health and education. Despite several attempts by the government to implement regionalization/decentralization reforms in Jordan since the early 2000’s, there is no clear national policy on local governance in Jordan. The country has always had a centralized approach to governance, budgeting, and delivery of public goods and services.

 In essence, sub-national entities have been, and still are, seen as extensions and executing arms of centrally designed policies. Decentralization was placed on the national development agenda in 2010 when the King established the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Decentralization. This placed special focus on enhancing the developmental role of Governorate-level administrations. Decentralization became even more relevant during the first years of the Arab Spring as the King proactively initiated further reforms. In 2015, a Decentralization Law was adopted which confirms the current status of the governorate as a deconcentrated body while reinforcing the role and authority of the governor, although a directly elected governorate council will be established. “The international donors were pressuring the government to adopt the Decentralization Law so the government did  pass the law only for the sake of the international entities. Knowing that Jordan is a very bureaucratic country, where everything government related is controlled by the central government is still uncertain to what extent the new law will lead to any substantial changes of independence in decision-making.”- Hamzah Shemaly, director of leaders international.

The inter-relationships and mandates of the different levels of sub-national governance are often unclear and confusing with mandates of national and local authorities overlapping. The situation after the local elections in 2017 will show in practice what the consequences of the decentralization law are for municipalities. The stakeholders that the SmartGov team met in Jordan either expressed uncertainty of what will happen after elections or believed that ‘nothing will change’. The governance context is further complicated by the fact that the governorate level is mainly the sphere of interest of the (often security-minded) Ministry of Interior while the municipal level is under supervision of the Ministry of Municipal Affairs. King Abdullah II has initiated a number of ambitious national development reforms including the Jordan First initiative launched in 2002 to promote the concept of a modern democratic state. This was followed by the National Agenda 2007–2017, covering three main areas: government and policies; basic rights and freedoms; and services, infrastructure and economic sectors. However, the national agenda was far from reality because no concrete results were seen except for endless conversations and negotiations. A third initiative was ‘We Are All Jordan’, which highlighted the development of citizenship and a sense of belonging as a main goal. Hamzah expressed, “Experience has shown that many of these ambitious national development reforms tend to falter and die without any real sustainable results, especially at a local level, the reason behind this is the lack of intentions for the people in power to make any law a reality.”The most current one is Jordan 2025, that facilitates the reform procedure which was launched in 2015 to improve the economic and political situation, and to activate the role of citizenship. This policy has sections on decentralization and is operationalized through Governorate Development Plans that are owned by the governorate level and Executive Development Plans coordinated by the Ministry of Planning.

Key features of local governance in Jordan
 

The governance structure of the main local government level – the municipality – is made up of the council, the mayor and the municipal administration:

• The Municipal Council sets the local development vision and adopts strategic plans and annual budgets. Councilors are elected and there is a 25 percent quota assigned to women. However, since the 2013 municipal elections, women have held close to 36 percent of council seats.

• The Mayor chairs the municipal council and acts as the chief executive officer of the municipality. As such he/she has full authority over the municipal  administration. Mayors are directly elected by the local constituency except the municipality of Amman, the mayor is appointed by the king himself..

• The municipality law provides for the appointment of an Executive Manager by each municipality to head the administration. However, there are many municipalities that haven’t done much but instead kept the Mayor as the administrative  head. MoMA has prepared standardized and organizational charts for the different categories of municipalities, with a Local Development Unit (LDU) and different sectoral departments and divisions.

Article 3 in the Municipalities Law reads: The municipality is a civic juridical institution with  financial and administrative independence. This is yet to be manifested in reality. Municipalities are essentially providers of classic municipal services such as urban planning, garbage collection, business regulation, slaughterhouse supervision, street maintenance, etc. However, municipalities are deprived of meaningful political or institutional autonomy as they have limited financial and administrative-technical capacities. This of course differs between municipalities and is also affected by structural factors such as size, location, number of staff, financial leverage, local economy, etc. At a central level, the municipal sector is supervised by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs (MoMA) which has both a supporting and controlling role, as well as delegated staff members who assist municipalities in certain operational duties.

For instance, the municipality of Amman is the only one that has enough funding and authority which makes it automatically very active. Moreover, the Mayor of Amman is described as the president referring to the high authorities he has, while other municipalities’ realities are harsh and limited to work of road and maintenance. Additionally, local development projects are highly centralized. 

From: Jordan scoping mission report 2021