Public-Private Partnerships in the GCC: Reality and Challenges

This article discusses the experience of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. It also explores the relevant individual characteristics of each country of the GCC and highlights the challenges each country faces or is likely to face in implementing PPPs. This paper seeks to understand the extent to which the implementation of PPPs in the GCC has been consistent with international best practices in formulating and creating legal and regulatory frameworks for such partnerships. It adopts a comparative approach to public policy analysis to review empirical and theoretical studies of PPPs in the GCC. The article concludes that all the GCC countries follow different, and sometimes unclear, policies in implementing partnerships and that these partnerships remain limited compared to their global counterparts. It also identifies the most significant and common obstacles and challenges these countries face in creating an attractive and competitive environment in which to implement sustainable partnerships that contribute to their ambitious economic visions and accelerate their transformation from a rentier into knowledge and production economies.

An Agenda for the Study of Public Administration in Developing Countries

Developing nations demand a different scholarly approach in the field of public administration. We advance an agenda for research that stands on four pillars. First, in the absence of easily accessible data scholars of developing world public administration must assemble it for themselves. Second, building and testing theory plays a paramount role because researchers face limited information. Third, in developing countries, multi-national and non-governmental organizations are often crucial and must be considered in studying public administration. Fourth, given the novelties and ambiguities researchers face, qualitative information must be integrated throughout the research process. Our article—and the articles in this volume—constitute a call for developing country research to contribute to the study of public administration writ large, informing our understanding of both developing and developed states.

Designing Health Policy to Fight the Coronavirus in Egypt and Turkey

This paper seeks to answer the following question: Why have the bureaucracies and executive arms of two highly centralized presidential regimes – Egypt and Turkey – produced such different responses to the Coronavirus crisis? Its basic hypothesis is that while the crisis did initially provide scope for ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats specialized in public health to play a greater part in making health policy, their ability to maintain this newfound influence depended on their "policy capability". Through a comparison of the two case studies, this article shows that the more centralized a state is, the more unprecedented the crisis is and the more policy capability it has, the greater the role bureaucrats play at the expense of politicians

Designing Health Policy to Fight the Coronavirus in Egypt and Turkey

This paper seeks to answer the following question: Why have the bureaucracies and executive arms of two highly centralized presidential regimes – Egypt and Turkey – produced such different responses to the Coronavirus crisis? Its basic hypothesis is that while the crisis did initially provide scope for ministers, technocrats and bureaucrats specialized in public health to play a greater part in making health policy, their ability to maintain this newfound influence depended on their "policy capability". Through a comparison of the two case studies, this article shows that the more centralized a state is, the more unprecedented the crisis is and the more policy capability it has, the greater the role bureaucrats play at the expense of politicians.

Fifty Years of Water Resource Management Policies in Tunisia: From Supply Management to Territorial Equity

Water resources in Tunisia are scarce and unevenly distributed between regions. As well, rainfall varies year-to-year. This study deals with the development of water resource management policies in Tunisia during the last five decades, starting with supply and mobilization management programs that transferred water resources from the interior to the coastal territories where the most important cities are and most economic activity takes place. This policy resulted in the establishment of an interconnected water system that remained in place until the end of the last century. The study also reviews the success of the demand management system the government has been forced by the increase in both urban consumption of water and agricultural needs to adopt. We also review the many challenges that set the current situation apart from previous periods of stress on the system, including high demand, climate change and social movements in the inner cities demanding the right for water, protected in the 2014 Constitution, be respected. The study highlights these challenges and suggests elements for a new resource governance that would draw on the accumulated good governance of the last five decades

Institutional Challenges of Economic Reforms: Tunisia during Democratic Transition

This paper focuses on the challenges of economic reform in post-revolution Tunisia. It underlines the importance of a mixed approach between political economy (positive) and normative economic analysis to implement an effective public policy reform agenda. The post-revolution situation underlines the need for a progressive consensual reform strategy to preserve the interests of different groups and overcome political and legislative polarization. Building an effective reform system in Tunisia will mean improving institutional public administration capacities, enhancing government leadership, and building an effective system of coordination, evaluation, and follow up.

The "State" Return to the Southern Syria: State and Non-State Actors Interaction

This study considers the changes that may affect the structure of the state in Syria during the post-conflict phase by assessing interactions between state and non-state actors in the lead-up to the reassertion of central control over southern Syria in 2018. These interactions took place at several overlapping levels (state/non-state, state/foreign, non-state/foreign). The study analyzes the interaction between the Syrian regime and ten different actors, arguing that the nature and trajectory of interactions between state and non-state actors were the result of the interaction of two basic categories of factors: internal (characteristics of actors) and external (structural). The main factors affecting how the regime approached specific actors were their political leanings and whether they enjoyed international support. Other factors were less influential on regime policy, i.e., the extent to which the state was able to fill the gap left behind by an actor's withdrawal or the national/transnational character of that actor's political project.

The Moroccan State between Centralization and Regionalism

This study interrogates the role played by advanced regionalism in reinforcing the centralization of the Moroccan state and reproducing its great reform dilemma: its desire to modernize (to some extent) while retaining a unitary centralized structure via the adoption of a vertical power structure vis-à-vis the regions. This parallels the failure to democratize and to develop a new social contract, keeping state resources firmly in the hands of the central state without meaningful participation by the regions. This strategy is implemented via the centralization of territorial control and the monopolization of resources, creating a regional division based on geographic, economic and developmental factors. It disregards the regions' cultural, historical and economic homogeneity, which might serve as the basis for a reconsideration of the state's unitary character, and feeds off the control of public space at a time when rural protest has been creating new social mobilization dynamics. The study also considers the effect of the geopolitics of the desert on the adoption of regionalism and the restructuring of the Moroccan state via control of the requirements of representation, mobilization and mediation in the desert. The legitimation of self-rule and the integration of desert elites into the state's central structure has underlined the risks elated to the reformation of the state through a strategy of local government re-formation in the desert that ultimately reinforces the state's legitimacy and centralized character without affecting the vertical organization of power.