The Difficult Road to Local Autonomy in Yemen

Since Yemen’s reunification in 1990, decentralization reforms periodically resurface on the national political agenda. They seem to offer a positive way to address the major political and developmental challenges that the country is facing: to build a modern State in a tribal society, to secure the country’s unity against southern separatism and to adopt a more geographically diffuse and sector diversified (away from oil) growth model, in which local development would have a key role. Moreover in Yemen, the experience of Local Development Associations of the 70’s and 80’s provides evidence of the potential of local autonomy for national development and state building at the periphery. Yet decentralization reforms in Yemen are stalled. Resistances come from the inability of the regime to act strategically instead of navigating from crisis to crisis through tactics of patronage and repression. They also come from a State bureaucracy, weary of local autonomy, and skeptical of the power of decentralization to bring new resources to bear on national development. But in 2007 a new window of opportunity has been opened by the President’s move to establish genuine local governments, accelerating the drafting and adoption of a National Decentralization Strategy (NDS). The urgent task is now to translate the NDS into an actionable and time-bound National Program for decentralization and local development, whose implementation, with much needed support by external aid agencies, could inaugurate a new season of local development’s contribution to national growth and accelerated state building at the periphery.