International IDEA measures local democracy at the country level over the period 1975-2025. The available data allows for comparisons by country and by regions defined by IDEA, but does not publish a single Arab regional average or a global score of 0.50 for this indicator. Civic engagement finds it difficult to express itself when local authorities have limited resources or competencies.
The Essentials
- International IDEA measures Local Democracy on a scale of 0 to 1 at the country level, without publishing an Arab regional average of 0.15 or a global average of 0.50.
- The Global State of Democracy framework includes the Representation indicator at the country level; no Arab regional score of 0.22 or comparison on this metric appears in the published data.
- Arab civil society remains active in several contexts, but its formal spaces for action remain limited.
- Strong budget and administrative centralization reduces the levers available to local elected officials, limiting their capacity to respond.
- The question for the coming decades is that of possible articulation between civic engagement and local institutional capacities.
A Score That Measures Lack of Influence, Not Absence of Activity
The score of 0.15 for local democracy deserves careful reading. International IDEA measures Local Democracy through the election and influence of local authorities as well as the freedom and fairness of infranational elections; access to justice falls under another sub-attribute. On these dimensions, country-level data shows weak results, but an Arab regional average is not available. The weakness of local democracy indicators does not signal a passive population. It signals local institutions whose representative capacities remain limited.
This distinction matters. In several countries in the region, associational activity and local initiatives have diversified since 2010. Human rights defense organizations, professional unions, women’s groups, networks of young activists document their activity. The Global State of Democracy 2026 analyzes democratic stagnation and regression in the region.
The problem remains that this informal engagement creates no formal political accountability. A mayor who is not elected answers to no one. A council without its own budget is severely limited in its capacities, even if it may depend on transfers or other resources. Civic engagement encounters clear institutional limits.
Representation at 0.22: A Fracture Wider Than Authoritarian Regimes
Representation scores cover very different regimes. The region includes constitutional monarchies, presidential republics, federal states, post-conflict regimes, and Gulf micro-states with high oil rents. Many systems in the region concentrate decisions at the national and executive levels, despite their institutional differences.
This concentration is not accidental. It is maintained by precise political logics. Resource allocation remains largely determined at the central level. Opposition parties, when they exist, remain excluded from local funding circuits. Municipal elections, where they are held, often concern limited competencies.
The division of competencies varies by country; in Morocco, certain water and urban planning functions explicitly fall to communes, while other issues remain centralized.
The result is a double frustration. Citizens engage around concrete problems and obtain no local response. Local elected officials, when they exist, are often limited in their capacity to deliver. This frustration is not without political consequences. Local service failures were among the sources of tension in several countries in the region, notably before 2011.
Civil Society Facing Blocked Institutions
The vitality of civic associations in contexts of authoritarianism has long been documented by researchers. It takes predictable forms: organizations doing what the state does not, networks circumventing formal procedures, collective practices that create solidarity without creating rights.
In several Arab cities, neighborhood associations manage waste collection when the municipality no longer does so. Teachers’ unions negotiate directly with families the conditions of schooling. Women’s organizations provide social support services that ministries do not fund. This fabric exists. It is often robust.
But it often functions as a substitute rather than a complement. This situation has effects: it can reduce institutional incentives while stabilizing situations of waiting. It can maintain a balance where civic activity coexists with limited formal political accountability. Some governments tolerate civic activity that remains service-oriented.
The Tunisian case after 2011 is instructive. The democratic transition produced a proliferation of associations. Tunisia went from approximately 9,600 registered associations in 2010 to 17,947 in 2014 and 21,336 in 2017. This vitality did not prevent the recentralization of power undertaken from 2021. Associational engagement and local democracy are two distinct variables.
One can grow without the other advancing.
The Blocking Mechanisms: Budget, Competencies, Appointment
Understanding the low scores for local democracy requires identifying concrete locks. Three mechanisms recur throughout the region.
The first is budgetary dependency. Local authorities in the region generally dispose of a small share of national public resources. Without predictable financial transfers, an elected municipal council has limited capacity to fund its own policies. It often depends on ministerial decisions that respond to national logics.
The second is the narrowness of competencies. Formal attributions of local authorities remain limited in many countries. The division of these competencies varies by country and level of authority. Local powers differ by country; some elected officials manage services directly linked to daily concerns, though often with limited means.
The third is the appointment of governors and representatives of the state at the local level. In many countries in the region, the top-ranking administrative official in a province or governorate is appointed by the central government. This official may exercise supervisory authority over local institutions when they exist. This architecture concentrates authority in the hands of an agent appointed by the national executive.
These three elements generally interact. An underfunded elected official, with limited competencies and under supervision, disposes of reduced autonomy, without necessarily being devoid of all power. A low perception of political efficacy can contribute to abstention, without necessarily leading to a decline in participation. What experiences in local governance in Brazil and elsewhere have begun to show is that a credible local institution first requires a real assignment of responsibilities: without it, even transparency mechanisms do not take hold.
Identified Margins for Progress and Current Bets
The picture is not uniform. Differences exist among the 22 states measured, and some trajectories merit attention.
Morocco has conducted advanced regionalization reforms since 2015, formally transferring competencies in the fields of economic development, culture, and environment to regions. Implementation remains uneven and budget transfers insufficient relative to new attributions, according to available assessments. But the institutional architecture has changed, and elected regional presidents dispose of their own mandate and legitimacy.
Jordan and Tunisia have conducted experiments in local participatory democracy on a reduced scale, with participatory budgets in certain municipalities. These experiments remain pilots, but they document what civic engagement can produce when it is connected to a concrete decision.
These cases do not change the regional score. But they indicate that local reform is feasible in contexts of strong centralization. In many cases, local reforms would suppose major political decisions to reallocate resources.
The question for the years 2030-2040 is precisely that. The region’s demographic dynamics, with young, urbanized, and connected populations, produce growing demands for services and representation. If local institutions retain limited capacities, this engagement risks seeking informal exits or becoming politicized at the national scale without local anchorage. Institutional reforms with resource transfers and clarification of responsibilities could modify the context of local civic engagement. The existence of accountable local institutions facilitates civic influence on local decisions, without being the sole condition.
Lessons from International Comparison
The score of 0.15 takes on its full meaning when set against other regions. Latin America, which experienced comparable authoritarian transitions in the 1970s-1980s, generally displays higher local democracy scores. Southeast Asia presents a mixed picture, with countries like Indonesia that conducted massive decentralization after 1998.
These comparisons suggest that current Arab centralization is not a cultural inevitability. It results from institutional choices that have been made, and that can be unmade. Post-colonial Arab states generally adopted highly centralized architectures. This centralization often produced variable administrative results and local representation deficits.
The most instructive point of comparison is perhaps sub-Saharan Africa, where countries starting from comparable centralization have conducted genuine decentralization since the 1990s. The results are heterogeneous, but they show that delegating power and resources to local authorities can improve service delivery and create circuits of accountability that citizens use. The local governance issues raised here moreover join broader questions about the capacity of states to integrate digital tools into relationships of service to citizens: Africa is charting its own paths on this terrain, with margins of adaptation that highly centralized states struggle to mobilize.
Margins for Action in Highly Centralized Systems
Arab civil society does not wait for institutions to reform before acting. It has adapted to their absence. Advocacy networks work at regional and international scale to weigh on decisions that national arenas block. Local organizations document service failures to bring them into media spaces that circumvent government control. Coalitions of municipalities in different countries exchange on practices of urban governance without waiting for their central governments to undertake reforms.
These bypass strategies have clear limits. They do not produce formal accountability that can be opposed to authorities. They do not allow citizens to sanction elected officials who have not kept their commitments. But they maintain an organizational capacity that will be useful if and when institutional reforms create spaces to occupy.
The open question is what will trigger these reforms. Pressures come from several directions: urgency of urban services in cities growing fast, demands from international donors who condition their aid on local governance criteria, and expectations of urban youth who have the tools to compare their situation to that of other regions of the world. None of these pressures is sufficient alone. Together, they draw a context where inaction carries political costs for central governments themselves.
Sources
- Amman Center for Human Rights Studies and Election Network in the Arab Region, Global State of Democracy 2026: A Look at the Arab World
- International IDEA, Global State of Democracy Indices, data 2006-2025 (database accessible via idea.int)
- Institut Montaigne, reports on local governance and decentralization reforms in Morocco and Jordan
