POLITICS GOVERNANCE STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS

POLITICS, GOVERNANCE, AND STATE-SOCIETY RELATIONS
without transparency, participation, and
accountability.
• The interests and capabilities of regional
actors—both state and non-state—in the effort
to establish sustainable governance are far
greater than those of the United States, Europe,
and other external actors. External actors can
provide ideas, incentives, and support for
necessary reforms—but the sustained will
to set an agenda for change, advance it, and
create accountability for it must come from
those in the region. One key insight is that,
after many failed attempts at top-down reform
and a region-wide series of popular uprisings,
the vector for change in the years to come will
continue to be from below—local communities
and civil society groups will create solutions and
drive change, rather than state institutions that
have largely lost public trust. How to generate
and maintain the will for positive change among
those in power is a key challenge for sustainable
governance in the Middle East.
• The various states of the Middle East find
themselves in very different circumstances,
and build on different political, cultural, and
social legacies that inform (and in certain ways
constrain) the negotiation of a new social
contract as well as the nature of the contract
that results. Describing the components of
sustainable and successful governance is
simple, but does not address the reasons
why such components did not emerge in the
region prior to 2011. This report highlights
core characteristics necessary for sustainable
governance in all these cases, but recognizes
that the way these characteristics may be
manifest in any given case depends on localized
and particular solutions. Arab citizens and
leaders must grapple with the realities they face
today, and with the obstacles to change within
their own societies, and must arrive at their own
means of overcoming the challenges that made
effective reform impossible in past years and
that present obstacles to reform today. Efforts
at the national level to control, squelch, or
curtail such debate will only deepen the crisis of
governance and retard durable solutions.
Given the above premises, this report eschews
efforts to lay out a recipe of specific reforms to
achieve sustainable governance (e.g., prescribing
certain types of procedures or institutions for
governance), although many such recipes are
available. Instead, the report focuses on core
principles and priorities in advancing the goal of
sustainable governance—that is, governance that
will last and that positions states to be effective
and reliable partners with the United States and
other international actors in maintaining regional
security and stability. Based on the working group’s
discussions and analysis, there are a few essential
ways of doing business that will be required to
make future governance in the Arab world more
durable and reliable than in the past:
1. Sustainable governance in the region will be
more inclusive: A major failing of pre-2011
governance, an error that is being compounded
in many ways in the post-2011 environment, is
exclusionary decision-making. Half the region’s
population is under thirty years of age, and its
female half is largely marginalized in social,
economic, and political decision-making.
However, governance by a narrow set of
largely older and largely male elites is a recipe
for grievance and instability—a fact made
manifest by the 2011 uprisings. In societies riven
by conflict, where government must rebuild
public trust, inclusion is even more important
as a primary means to avoid exacerbating
social divisions and to sustain peace. Moreover,
recent scholarship emphasizes the centrality
of inclusive governance to successful
development. 1 Much of the violence in the Arab
world since 2011 has been a manifestation of
a winner-take-all approach to politics. But the
region’s demographics and the complexity
of the twenty-first-century world make such
zero-sum approaches inviable for sustainable
governance. Today’s social, economic, and
political realities mean that, to be sustainable
and successful, government authority must
rest on a wider base of social support and
government decisions must reflect consultation
with a wider range of interest groups and
achieve a wider degree of societal consensus.
2. Durable governance in the region will be more
transparent: Another failing of Middle Eastern
governance has been opacity—affected or
interested groups, and the public at large,
have had little access to information about
government plans, decisions, and actions.
Attempts by media or civil society to share
information about government behavior with
the public have been opposed by regional
governments keen to prevent critics from
1 Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail
(New York: Crown Publishers, 2012).
8 ATLANTIC COUNCIL