On the closing day of the Your Role campaign within the Local Administration Project, the Nation Building Movement held an event attended by activists, experts, journalists, and those interested in public affairs, on Saturday, October 29, 2022, to launch its national report entitled “The Interaction of Development Forces with the Status of Local Administration Elections in Syria.”
The event included a presentation of the three tracks of the “Your Role” campaign: the civil track, the media track, and the follow-up track. The beginning was with a presentation of the civil track with the track coordinator, Ghadir Ghanem, who explained the movement’s work in establishing the civil role of local administration. The civil track organized five dialogue sessions, which varied between reviewing the performance of previous local councils, shedding light on the role of youth and women in local administration, ways to enhance community participation, and the development priorities of localities, in addition to two dialogue sessions with a number of development and media experts. Some pictures and photo reports of the initiatives implemented in several governorates were also presented.
The second track is the follow-up and monitoring track, which was reviewed by the supervisor of the national report and director of the “Your Role” campaign, Samer Dahi, in a presentation that highlighted the follow-up patterns, methods, results, and development indicators. He also explained the variation in the distribution of the number of local councils according to the governorates. He stated that the goal of this track is to enable activists and media professionals to read the social interactions of development actors within the localities, as work was done to empower a local team to follow up on local community interaction with the elections in each governorate, who in turn produced 14 local documentary follow-up reports for the Syrian governorates in addition to a central report, a report on community interaction by official and community actors in the development process in each governorate, and other statistics and data included in the presentation.
The presentation by journalist Ziad Ghosn, the trainer responsible for a group of journalists and activists in the “Your Role” campaign, was that through this path, the most participatory development model for journalistic coverage of local government activities, especially the elections, was sought. He also pointed out some recommendations, the most important of which is working to qualify journalists, empower them, and build their capacities while benefiting from the margin of freedom available to a greater degree in localities than in the center, working to develop local media so that it is an outlet for people, restructuring the local media system to achieve independence in its work, and transforming official media outlets into independent bodies. Anas Joudeh, head of the Nation Building Movement, presented a presentation on the national report, in which he spoke about monitoring interactions, including recommendations for participatory local development, and recommendations on the roles of actors, including civil forces, family relation forces, the private sector, and political forces, pointing out that the movement’s goal in launching the campaign is not limited to elections, but rather it is concerned with the issue of local administration, including the elections decree and the appointment of members of local councils, and activating the role of councils and public participation in local administration, adding that local administration council elections are an important opportunity to enhance social concepts related to expanding the circle of community participation in all its forms, whether through supporting the participation of women and youth in the electoral process, or in enhancing the role and participation of civil society organizations and individuals, so that they can be real partners in the early recovery phase and the challenges it poses to the development process and its sustainability.
In conclusion, the attendees pointed out that development plans should focus on rural areas as much as they care about cities, in addition to the fact that some localities are unable to advance development plans due to limited resources and lack of competencies. They also added that the private sector has begun to work with some localities, perhaps indirectly, through its close circle. They stressed the importance of granting trust to localities to advance local development reality, and the possibility of working to compare the existing decentralization experience with decentralization in other countries such as Egypt, and benefiting from and reading those experiences, and extracting lessons learned. They also pointed out the absence of the awareness-raising role of local media, as well as the absence of private media, whose role was limited compared to government media. They stated that there is a failure on the part of civil actors to take the initiative towards society to introduce themselves and their role.
Some participants commented on the pillar of women's representation mentioned in the report. Some supported the idea that it should be effective and not formal, while others found that what is required is political will to activate the role of women and youth, not a women's quota. In addition, there is a fear that the women's quota will become ineffective and lead to the arrival of ineffective women. In addition, there are some formal observations that will be provided to the movement, and some technical observations, noting that the report fills the existing gap and can constitute reliable information and data. The report will be available to everyone in the coming days after completing some observations that can be used as a basis for the final amendment.
