Democratic Governance >> Governance in the Arab Region: The Driving Forces for Reform

Governance in the Arab world can be characterized by two patterns. First, the current pattern of governance is marked by the existence of a powerful executive branch. The institutional checks and balances are weak, and popular participation in the public sphere is low. The executive branch enjoys extensive constitutional and extra-constitutional authority, thereby exerting significant control over other branches of government. Second, the state-civil society relationship is often perceived as a zero sum game. In many countries, governments see the civil society organizations not as partners but as competitors in the delivery of services, channels of resources from international donors, or as watchdogs and challengers of state policies and actions.

Despite these characteristics, the Arab region has experienced an important change: the very language of democratic governance has come to acquire considerable symbolic value as a standard against which processes and institutions are measured. There is a need to review and rebuild the governance systems in the Arab states in order to achieve sustainable human development. This need arises from several factors. First, better-informed and educated populations are making new demands on their governments. Secondly, mounting unemployment, notably of high school and university graduates, is posing new challenges to governments and their public and private sectors. Finally, changes in the relationship between states, markets, and civil society, due to globalization and rapid technological progress, challenge state-dominated governance.

Most governments in the region are engaging in economic adjustment in order to benefit from opportunities offered by global economic growth. Encouraged by the increasing influence of international organizations and NGOs associated with globalization, civil societies in the region are also supporting efforts to reform their respective governments. The global information revolution, too, spearheaded by regional Internet and television networks, is influencing governance in the region in the direction of greater transparency. Governments are adjusting to the information revolution in many ways. While some of them attempt to control access to various international Internet sites, they are also projecting their presence online for their growing numbers of Internet users and for their international audiences as well. The awakening of civil society and greater transparency are stimulating demands for more participation, greater accountability, equity, and the rule of law.

These forces for change are affecting the entire region, as is evidenced by its progress in education and human development. Each state has made substantial gains over the past quarter of a century, albeit from different starting points. Countries as diverse as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Egypt, and Oman increased their Human Development Index scores by 16 to 28 points on a scale of 100 from 1975 to 2002 (UNDP, HDR 2004: http://hdr.undp.org/statistics/data/). This index is a composite indicator of life expectancy at birth, literacy and education, and economic living standards (see HDR 2001, pp. 239-240). On average, by country, life expectancies increased by about 11 years (WDI 2004) between 1975 and 2002, although average per capita income in the Middle East and North Africa diminished, in constant 1995 dollars, because of rapid population growth and relative declines in oil revenues. However, countries that were not major oil producers tended to fare much better during the past quarter century: Egypt, for instance, more than doubled its per capita income to achieve a purchasing power parity equivalent of $3810 per capita in 2002. The most striking progress, however, was in the field of education, creating those well-informed citizens who make new demands on their governments.

One of the most critical indicators of education progress, from the standpoint of sustainable human development, is the enrollment of females in secondary school. On this dimension, as on others, the Arab countries made substantial progress, as reported in the following table.

Female Secondary Gross Enrollment as a Percentage of School Age Females, 1975-2002

Enrollments jumped from 24 to 67 per cent of the female populations of the MENA countries from 1975 to 2000, and illiteracy among young women ages 15-24 correspondingly declined, from 66% in 1975 to 18% in 2001. Nevertheless, overall educational levels did not catch up with income levels in most Arab countries. In general, the educational levels that countries achieve are highly correlated with their per capita incomes, but many Arab societies, including poor ones as well as the wealthy, seemed less educated than those of other regions with comparable incomes. More than half the Arab countries scored at least 1 standard deviation lower on their UNDP Educational Index than their purchasing power GDP index predicted. There were also vast pockets of illiteracy and inequalities of opportunity between the cities and the countryside in some countries.

The Arab region may also be experiencing more serious problems of unemployment than other regions. Reliable statistics are not available but the rapid advances in education, notably at the secondary and university levels; seem to have created vast reservoirs of unemployed yet educated youth, up to 40 or 50% of the young male adults of some cities. Governments are hard pressed to provide adequate job opportunities, yet private sectors are often unwilling or unable to take up the challenge. In the short run, at least, economic adjustment program face a general reluctance on the part of governments to introduce privatization measures that may compound the unemployment problem.

Finally, however, some progress is being made in the development of private sectors and civil societies in the region. One measure of the economic vitality of the private sector is the amount of credit made available by its commercial banking system. Credit to the private sector increased, on average, in the region from 19 to 42 per cent of GDP from 1975 to 1997. Another more basic indicator of the economic health of civil society may be simply the amounts of financial assets that people and businesses are willing to hold in their banking institutions, rather than in the form cash under their mattresses. The ratio of Contract-Intensive Money (held in various institutions) to the total money supply has steadily increased, as the following table shows.

Another sign of the growing vitality of civil society -- at least for younger generations -- may be the recent introduction of electronic messaging and media through Internet cafes extending across the region from Algiers and Casablanca to Amman and Cairo. The World Bank estimates that over 8 million of the people in the Arab region used the Internet by the end of 2002, compared to less than 40,000 in 1995. Newspaper readership, however, slightly diminished in the region, reflecting the dead hand of censorship in many countries despite major increases in literacy. Only 33 daily newspapers circulated per 1000 people in 1996, compared to 35 newspapers in 1975. On the other hand, television sets multiplied fourfold during the same period, and many of them pick up stations broadcasting in Arabic from other countries. Qatar, with 56 subscribers per 1000 people in 2001, leads the way with cable TV.

Important social changes of course do not guarantee political reform, which is a matter for the respective states. POGAR documents the evolving forms of governance in the Arab region and the growing presence online of its states and civil societies. Eight critical aspects of governance are treated: civil society's relationship to the state, the constitution, decentralization and urban and local government, elections and electoral laws, financial management of the economy, judicial reform and the rule of law, legislative checks and balances, and the role of women in public decision-making.