Jordan's Local Governance Reform Context

Research · 2021-04-26

Key points

  • In 2021, Jordan’s sub-national entities remained executing arms of the central government: 12 governorates and 100 municipalities operating under close ministerial control.
  • Municipal autonomy existed on paper. The Municipalities Law declared financial and administrative independence that few municipalities exercised in practice.
  • Stakeholders read the 2015 decentralisation package as donor-driven and expected little change without political intent behind the law.
  • Digitisation efforts were undermined less by technology than by institutions: a lesson that still anchors SmartGov’s approach to reform.

1. Why SmartGov went to Jordan

In April 2021, SmartGov conducted a scoping mission to Jordan to understand the country’s governance and reform context and to map civic engagement and digitalisation initiatives. The team met national institutions, municipal practitioners and development partners, and reviewed programme experience from other organisations working on local governance. The purpose was practical: to ground any future governance and digitalisation work in the realities of Jordan’s system rather than in its legislation. This Insight distils what the mission found. It describes the system as it stood in 2021: its history, its structure, its politics and its aid landscape.

2. A system centralised by design

Jordan is a constitutional monarchy in which the King holds wide executive and legislative powers: he appoints the Prime Minister, and may dissolve parliament and dismiss governments. Below the centre sit two sub-national tiers: 12 governorates with their districts and sub-districts, and 100 municipalities divided into three categories. The tiers answer to different masters. Governorates fall within the sphere of the security-minded Ministry of Interior, while municipalities are supervised by the Ministry of Municipal Affairs (MoMA). In practice, the mission counted no fewer than five levels of local decision-making bodies, with mandates that overlap and blur. Sub-national entities have long been treated as extensions and executing arms of centrally designed policy. Budgeting, planning and the delivery of public goods ran through Amman. Jordan’s local governance at a glance (2021)

  • Governorates: 12, under the Ministry of Interior
  • Municipalities: 100, in three categories, under MoMA
  • Levels of local decision-making: No fewer than five, with overlapping mandates
  • Women on municipal councils: 25% quota; close to 36% of seats held since 2013
  • Mayor of Amman: Appointed by the King; all other mayors elected

3. A century of municipal tradition, a decade of hesitant decentralisation

Municipal institutions in the territory of present-day Jordan date back to the Ottoman municipalities law of 1877. The modern framework began with the Municipalities Law of 1955, which gave municipalities broad mandates, including health and education. Successive amendments (1994, 2001, 2007, 2011 and 2015) narrowed those roles, and the 2015 law added strategic planning and local development functions (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 2015b). Decentralisation entered the national agenda in 2010, when the King established the Inter-Ministerial Committee on Decentralization, and gained urgency in the early years of the Arab Spring. The Decentralization Law of 2015 kept governorates as deconcentrated bodies and reinforced the governor’s authority, while introducing directly elected governorate councils, first elected in 2017 (Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, 2015a). The pattern around these laws was familiar from earlier initiatives. Jordan First (2002), the National Agenda (2007–2017) and We Are All Jordan promised modernisation and produced few concrete results at the local level. Jordan 2025, launched in 2015, carried the decentralisation agenda into governorate and executive development plans (Government of Jordan, 2015). Stakeholders the mission met had learned to withhold judgement. Jordan’s local governance reform timeline, 1877–2017

  • 1877: Ottoman municipalities law establishes town councils in the region
  • 1955: First Municipalities Law grants broad mandates, including health and education
  • 1994–2011: Successive amendments narrow municipal roles
  • 2002–2007: Jordan First and the National Agenda promise modernisation with few local results
  • 2010: Inter-Ministerial Committee on Decentralization established
  • 2015: Decentralization Law and new Municipalities Law adopted; Jordan 2025 launched
  • 2017: First elections to governorate councils

4. Municipalities on paper and in practice

Three organs govern a Jordanian municipality. The elected Municipal Council sets the development vision and adopts plans and budgets, with a 25% quota for women; since the 2013 elections, women have in fact held close to 36% of council seats. The Mayor chairs the council and heads the administration, directly elected everywhere except Amman, where the mayor is appointed by the King. The law also provides for an appointed Executive Manager, though many municipalities left the administration with the Mayor. The Municipalities Law describes municipalities as civic juridical institutions with financial and administrative independence. The mission found little of that independence in practice. Municipalities delivered classic services: urban planning, waste collection, business regulation and street maintenance. Political and institutional autonomy remained limited by capacity, finance and central control, with wide variation by size, location and local economy. At the centre, MoMA played both a supporting and a controlling role: it prepared standardised organisational charts for each category of municipality, each with a Local Development Unit (LDU), and seconded staff into municipal operations. Amman was the exception that proved the rule. The capital alone had the funding and authority to act, and its mayor was described to the mission as “the president”. Elsewhere, municipal reality was often reduced to roads and maintenance, with development projects centralised in Amman.

5. What stakeholders told the mission

Scepticism dominated. Hamzah Shemaly, director of Leaders International, told the mission that international donors had pressured the government into the Decentralization Law, and that the government “passed the law only for the sake of the international entities”. In his experience, ambitious national reforms “tend to falter and die without any real sustainable results, especially at a local level”. Others simply expected that “nothing will change”. One testimony captured why digitisation alone changes little. Jamal Al Jabiri, a former USAID economic-growth official and long-time adviser to government and international agencies, described a ministry that installed a machine to automate a public service. An employee sabotaged it deliberately, because manual processing was where bribes were paid. The lesson was institutional rather than technical: digitisation fails where incentives defend the manual process.

6. A favoured recipient: the aid landscape

The Syria crisis transformed Jordan into one of the region’s most assisted states. By 2021, most major donors, UN agencies and international NGOs operated in the country, within the framework of the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan. More than 85% of refugees lived outside camps and relied on services delivered by central and local government, pushing assistance from humanitarian relief towards resilience and local development. Local governance programming concentrated on emergency service delivery: equipment and basic training, mainly in the northern governorates. The largest such programme was the World Bank-administered Emergency Services and Social Resilience programme, later scaled up through a successor municipal services project (World Bank, 2013). Coordination between humanitarian and development assistance left room for improvement, and the LDUs carried much of the coordination burden at municipal level.

7. What the mission concluded

Five observations formed the mission’s core conclusions in 2021:

  • Reform legislation without political intent changes little; stakeholders judge laws by implementation, not adoption.
  • Clarity of mandates between governorates, municipalities and ministries is the precondition for any real devolution of authority.
  • Outside Amman, municipal capacity, not municipal legislation, set the binding constraint.
  • Digitisation succeeds only with institutional safeguards; where incentives protect manual processes, technology is defeated from within.
  • Donor coordination and locally owned development planning, through structures such as the LDUs, offered the most practical entry points. These are the observations against which Jordan’s subsequent reforms can now be read.

References

Government of Jordan (2015), Jordan 2025: A National Vision and Strategy, Amman, https://andp.unescwa.org/plans/1153 Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1955), Municipalities Law of 1955, Official Gazette, Amman. Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (2015a), Decentralization Law No. 49 of 2015, Official Gazette, Amman. Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (2015b), Municipalities Law No. 41 of 2015, Official Gazette, Amman. Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (2021), Local Administration Law No. 22 of 2021, Official Gazette, Amman. World Bank (2013), Jordan Emergency Services and Social Resilience Project, Washington, DC, https://documents.worldbank.org/en/publication/documents-reports/documentdetail/532171468273353365/jordan-emergency-services-and-social-resilience-project