Participatory Democracy as a Constitutional Requirement: Experiences with Citizen Participation in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Abstract

The Tunisian Constitution of 2014 requires local authorities to adopt mechanisms of participatory democracy. This paper presents how citizen participation in development planning has been implemented by the Tunisian administration in the frame of two Tunisian-German cooperation projects funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and implemented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH. The first project example consists of a multi-stakeholder dialogue for integrated water resource management in Kairouan, central Tunisia, whereas the second example is about citizen participation in planning small-scale investments in local infrastructure in different parts of the country. External facilitation, inclusiveness, transparency, expectation management and commitment from all levels of the administration are described as success factors for implementing participatory processes. Similar cooperation projects supporting citizen participation should be aware of on-going power struggles at different levels, as well as the challenges of local legal implementation. Both examples illustrate areas of tension between the remnants of the authoritarian past in Tunisia, and innovative democratic approaches. Furthermore, the examples allow to observe how ambiguities regarding the distribution of decision-making power between national, regional and local level become manifest in the on-going process of decentralisation in Tunisia.