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Local Politics in Jordan and Morocco: Strategies of Centralization and Decentralization, by Janine A. Clark. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 416 pages. $65.
Reviewed by Laurie A. Brand
In a book that draws on a wealth of field research and interviews, Janine Clark addresses the question of when and why authoritarian regimes choose to decentralize. Her cases, Jordan and Morocco, are both monarchies that have faced the challenges of structural adjustment promoted or dictated by international financial institutions. Why is it, she asks, that Morocco chose decentralization and Jordan, at least until 2015, did not?
Clark argues that the key to understanding the different choices lies in the composition of the sociopolitical coalition underpinning each regime and, in particular, the strength of political parties. In Morocco, she argues that when the regime felt challenged in the 1980s, it chose to decentralize power to expand its base from an elite of makhzen (government) and Berber notables. As it allowed for the establishment of new civil society organizations as well as new elected councils, elites from the political parties, which Clark characterizes as institutionally strong but had played an oppositional role, sought to capture these new "resources" and were in turn "captured" by the regime. Clark argues that the only exception to this pattern was the Justice and Development Party, the Islamist faction she devotes a separate chapter to.
In the case of Jordan, on the other hand, favoring the Transjordanian tribes as the bedrock of regime support, the Hashemite monarchs long eschewed decentralization. Clark argues that the choice of centralization strengthened tribalism and thereby undermined political party development. As a result,...