AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	17. States at work: African public services in comparative perspective
Paper ID	293
Author(s)	Bergh, Sylvia I.
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	This paper combines a historical and institutional perspective to consider the case of the Moroccan public administration’s capacity to implement ‘participatory’ development policy. It does so by examining several fieldwork-based case studies of ‘participatory’ rural development and natural resource management projects. The main argument it puts forward is that while limited human and material resources can partly explain the limited capacity, the main constraint can be found in the purely technical and depoliticized view of participation that dominates the attitudes of Moroccan civil servants involved in such projects. The deeper origin of such attitudes lie in the central government’s reluctance to open up the spaces that are necessary for a more political sense of agency to develop. The latter would in turn allow participation to unfold as a truly transformative power for rural development. In order to make this argument as clearly and concisely as possible, this paper is structured as follows. First, it considers the origins of the notion of ‘participation’ in official discourse in Morocco (particularly in the “2020 Rural Development Strategy” announced in 1999), the role of external donors in promoting it, and its operational principles. The main part of the paper then reviews the record of recent ‘participatory’ projects and programs implemented by the Moroccan public administration, and in particular by the provincial and regional delegations of the Ministry of Agriculture and the High Commission for Water and Forests of Al Haouz province in the High Atlas mountains. The main case studies here are the World Bank’s “Irrigation-based Community Development Project”, the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) “Rural Development Project in the Mountain Zones of Al Haouz Province”, and the German Technical Cooperation’s (GTZ) “Management and Conservation of Natural Resources Project in the Toubkal National Park”. The analysis of these case studies focuses on the findings from project documents and interviews with donor agencies, consultants, civil servants, and project beneficiaries with regard to how the notion of ‘participation’ was understood and implemented. It tries to attribute the shortcomings to constraints in human and material resources and incentives, personal attitudes, and the stated operating principles. Furthermore, the analysis tries to bring out the lack of linkages between participation in the village associations that were created as part of these projects, and more political participation in local government institutions. This lack of linkages between ‘project’ participation and ‘political’ participation (due in part also to the weak position of ‘citizenship’ which could potentially serve as a bridge between the two) explains the observed elite capture over these projects by a small minority of politically well-connected agents and more importantly, the absence of truly ‘transformative’ participation that would durably alter the local power relations in favor of the poor. To conclude, this paper aims to contribute to the panel’s discussion on the “real” workings of African states by focusing on the human, material, attitudinal, and political constraints to the Moroccan administration’s capacity to implement ‘participatory’ projects in a way that would make a real difference for rural development.

Public administration capacity to implement 'participatory' development policy: Evidence from Morocco