The Nation Building Movement held two focused sessions within the “Your Role” campaign to discuss the roles played by development actors at the central and local levels during the recent local administration elections, and how to benefit from the experience to envision possible approaches to activating decentralization towards launching local development that works to build peace in the Syrian case. Given the importance of the media and its role, the first session was devoted on September 26, 2022, entitled “Local Media, Development and Peacebuilding” with media experts to discuss the reality of local media and the most prominent challenges facing the activation of its role in the local development process at the central and local levels.
In order to delve deeper into the roles of development actors in the local administration structure and the ways to activate it and achieve administrative decentralization adopted by Law 107, the movement held the second focused session with development experts on Saturday, October 15, 2022, entitled "Towards Local Governance for Development" to discuss approaches to transition to recovery through activating local administration. According to experts, the absence of development policies in the first line is one of the most important challenges facing the reality of local development, and therefore they saw that the transition to participatory development is difficult and faces many obstacles, so it is not possible to talk about community participation without emphasizing that it is a broad, integrated political, social, cultural and legal process.
The problem of the legislative, financial and institutional structure that hinders the activation of the Local Administration Law in a way that helps local councils in developing development plans emerged. Participants also noted that the obstacle to developing development plans is not the poor economic situation of many localities, but rather the inability of elected councils to develop local development plans is mainly due to lack of experience. There are many localities with poor economic situations whose participation was greater than that of regions with greater economic capabilities.
Participants express out that this expertise is necessary to identify societal problems and local needs, read the human resources and community capital that characterize each region, and move from the relief aspect to production, as framing development in relying on the center, and in the logic of support and relief, destroys the foundations of the idea of sustainable development. The necessity of integrating plans between neighboring localities through what can be considered integrated economic zones was also emphasized, as the law was loose in certain places when it equated all administrative units in planning and implementation powers, and this requires strengthening the idea of joint administrations, and activating the urban observatories stipulated in the Local Administration Law to serve as an information bank that provides everything related to the reality of localities and helps specialized agencies in developing development plans. In light of all these requirements, the most important question arises about the ability of the Planning and International Cooperation Authority to achieve development and draw up development plans.
Although everyone emphasized the importance of Local Administration Law No. 107, implementation was not up to the level of this law, noting that the view of the national plan for administrative decentralization is centered on it being a mere transfer of powers without paying attention to the developmental dimensions. On the other hand, and despite the importance of the national plan for administrative decentralization, in the current situation, experts saw that centralization is the best way to maintain the cohesion of the state, expressing that this demand does not mean that this centralization should be monopolistic. To achieve a balance between achieving local development and the required centralization, the importance of supporting the center with a basic force that is acceptable and relies on community participation through activating localities emerged among the attendees in a way that contributes to bridging the trust gap that has widened and continues to widen between the citizen and his institutions, working to eliminate the causes of frustration, and believing that democracy begins from the smallest point in the localities and reaches community participation in decision-making.
In reference to the absence of the required community participation, there was also emphasis on the absence of a supervisory process for these elections, and thus the loss of accountability, which was caused by the merger between the Baath Party and the government, which weakened the role of the rest of the parties, even the front parties. As for the media, the need emerged to restructure the media system and move with the logic of thinking to activate local media as a partner with civil society, the community and local councils in the development process, and this necessarily requires implementing the media law first and developing it second in a manner that is consistent with the roles required of it in the recovery phase.
According to experts, the lack of a clear strategy for developing local media, the lack of vision for the importance of local journalism, the failure to benefit from the cumulative process of media and the spread of corruption, restrict work in local media with many difficulties and challenges. The problem lies in the extreme centralization with which media is managed in general, especially local media. The government was the one directing the media even without a national media plan and thus the lack of specific media policies. In addition, the absence of the role of the Journalists Union in defending the role of journalists was noted. In general, the gaps in the media made us prey to unknown external platforms that were able to influence and reach a large percentage of Syrians. The challenge of social media should not be overlooked, as society has become able to form and collect its information and news, and address and discuss its issues. Thus, the local community has been able to overcome the inactivity of the absent local government media, while private media has its wide margins under certain conditions. Despite this, it imitates government media and considers it its guide. Stopping work on qualifying, empowering and building the capacities of journalists is one of the most important recommendations, with an emphasis on the margin of freedom, in addition to working on developing local media so that it is an outlet for people and focusing the media on local issues so that it is one of the means or tools for solving development problems. Therefore, the experts suggested holding a focused dialogue between all parties with the aim of reaching a protocol, formula or document that includes the duties and responsibilities of each party, forming a phased plan to achieve recovery through local empowerment, in addition to changing the way of thinking about the basic principles of governance and working to activate accountability and achieve transparency.