The right to petition to Moroccan municipalities

Research in Progress Seminar with Francesco Colin
PhD student
Date
Thursday 10 Feb 2022, 13:00 - 14:00
Type
Seminar
Spoken Language
English
Room
Online via Zoom
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Please send an email to Jessica Pernozzoli if you would like to receive the Zoom link to attend this online event.

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Francesco Colin

In this Research in Progress Seminar Francesco Colin reviews citizens’ experiences with institutional arenas for participation.

In Morocco, citizens have seen their prerogatives for participation in public governance increase over the last years. Granted as a response to the mobilization during the so-called ‘Arab spring’, the 2011 Constitution provides concrete mechanisms to allow citizens to contribute to public policy making – including the right to present petitions to public powers.

In 2015, a comprehensive reform of the decentralization framework further developed the space for citizens’ engagement at the local level: the right to petition is granted as a tool to add a question to the agenda of local governments’ councils.

In spite of an increasing detachment from politics and a plummeting trust in political institutions, citizens continue to exercise their right to petition. Notably, local governments have been privileged as the arena to perform the right to petition: between 2015 and 2019, 5 petitions were presented at the national level, against 212 petitions at the local level – of which 155 to municipal councils.

Submitting a petition to the municipal council represents an opportunity to present citizens’ claims to the municipality with the (relative) legal guarantee that they will be discussed. However, exercising the right to petition is a costly effort, which requires the knowledge of the legal framework and the capacity to seize it, and the often limited policy outputs further question its effectiveness to systematically include citizens in municipal governance.

This seminar will discuss the preliminary findings of fieldwork conducted between August 2020 and December 2021 in the framework of a PhD research project. The presentation will review the extent to which this right has been exercised as well as authorities’ reaction and the actual policy output yielded by petitionary initiatives.

Going beyond the appreciation of petitions as a tool to participate in local governance, this presentation revolves around the modes and reasons behind citizens’ exercise of the right to petition to Moroccan municipalities. Ultimately, the goal of this research is to shed light on the mutual influences between the possibility to participate in local governance through petitions and the way in which rights claims are made at the local level.

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