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Morocco is, by many measures, a country on the move. Its economy grew at 3.2 percent in 2024, its renewable energy sector is expanding rapidly, and its diplomatic standing on the world stage has arguably never been stronger. And yet, beneath these headline figures, a quieter and more stubborn problem persists. The gap between what Morocco’s public institutions promise and what citizens actually experience on the ground remains wide, often painfully so.
It is precisely this gap that Ahmed Jazouli, an international expert in governance, democracy and development, has spent a career trying to understand and to close. His new book, “Le pouvoir du détail dans la gouvernance des collectivités territoriales au Maroc” (The Power of Detail in the Governance of Moroccan Local Authorities), published in early 2026, arrives at a moment when that gap has become impossible to ignore.
A country of ambitious plans, incomplete results
The timing of Jazouli’s book is not accidental. Morocco’s Court of Accounts, one of the country’s most credible institutions, has in its recent annual reports delivered a diagnosis that is at once frank and sobering. Out of 78 conventions signed before the King between 2008 and 2020, only 32 had been completed. Though these completed agreements represent 41 percent of the programs by number, they account for just 9 percent of the funds committed, totaling around 16.6 billion dirhams. That is not a planning failure. It is an execution failure.
The picture does not improve when one zooms in on integrated territorial development. Out of 158 programs launched since 2010, only 41 were completed, representing 26 percent by number and a mere 14 percent by financial value, at a cost of 6.3 billion dirhams out of a total envelope of 45 billion. Meanwhile, contracts signed between the state and the regions between 2020 and 2022 show a realization rate of just 9 percent, and no new contracts have been validated for the 2022 to 2027 period. Even Morocco’s framework for decentralizing administrative authority has struggled to take hold. The implementation rate of the Administrative Deconcentration Charter’s roadmap stood at only 36 percent as of the end of 2024. The Court of Accounts itself has called for moving beyond simple quantitative tracking of projects toward a genuine qualitative assessment of their real impact on citizens and local economies.
In short, Morocco has been extraordinarily good at designing ambitious programs and remarkably inconsistent at seeing them through.
What Jazouli argues, and why it matters
Into this landscape steps Jazouli’s 296-page volume, which is at once a practitioner’s manual, a sociological analysis, and a policy argument. Jazouli brings to his subject a rare combination of academic rigor and field experience, having worked at the intersection of governance theory and development practice across Morocco and internationally.
His central argument is deceptively simple. Public policies in Morocco, he writes, rarely fail because of a shortage of ideas. They fail because of weaknesses in conception, in steering, and above all in implementation. The details, in other words, are not a secondary matter to be handled after the grand strategy is settled. They are the strategy.
To give this argument practical shape, Jazouli proposes a method he calls OPPOSER, an acronym drawn from the French words for Objective, Person, Plan, Openness, Monitoring and Evaluation, and Reports. The method is designed specifically for the design phase of public policies, guiding practitioners from the clarity of an objective all the way through to the production of a measurable impact that citizens can see and feel in their daily lives.
The starting point of the method is objectives. Not objectives as they typically appear in Moroccan planning documents, vague, aspirational, and disconnected from available resources, but objectives that are specific, measurable, ranked by priority, and calibrated against the realistic capacity to mobilize people and money. The goal, Jazouli argues, is to make the objective a compass, not a slogan.
From there, the method moves to what Jazouli regards, as the heart of any governance challenge, the human factor. Projects succeed or fail because of the people who carry them. This sounds obvious, but its implications are radical. It means that placing the right person in the right role is not a personnel matter. It is a policy matter. Moreover, it means that elected officials, of whom Jazouli boldly conceives as “ministers of their territories,” must be trained, coached, and held to professional standards that most Moroccan local governments have not yet established.
This is not a comfortable argument in a country where local electoral politics often reward loyalty and influence over competence. Nevertheless, it is an honest one.
Territory as a social space, not just an administrative boundary
What distinguishes Jazouli’s book from a simple management manual is its sociological depth. Territory, he insists, is not merely an administrative perimeter. It is a social space, shaped by local cultures, collective memories, and webs of trust or distrust between institutions and citizens. To govern a territory without understanding these dynamics is to govern blindly.
This insight leads Jazouli to one of his most original concepts, namely the territorial social contract. Rather than policies imposed from the top down, Jazouli envisions a framework of co-construction between local governments, elected officials, civil society organizations, and citizens themselves. The legitimacy of public action, he argues, does not come from legal authority alone. It comes from shared ownership. When citizens help shape a program, they are far more likely to defend it, monitor it, and hold their representatives accountable for it.
This idea resonates with findings from Morocco’s own governance experience. The Court of Accounts has explicitly advocated for proximity governance that brings together regional education academies, local authorities, and civil society, arguing that this kind of collaboration is essential to producing real results on the ground. Jazouli’s book provides the theoretical and methodological scaffolding for exactly that vision.
The question of accountability
One of the book’s most pointed sections addresses monitoring, evaluation, and reporting, not as bureaucratic obligations but as management tools. Jazouli argues for performance reports that are produced for each project and shared not only internally but with the public. The citizen, in his framework, is both the beneficiary of public policy and an actor in democratic accountability. When informed, citizens can track progress, raise concerns, and contribute actively to the success of the programs meant to serve them.
This argument gains particular force in light of what Morocco’s oversight institutions have found. Morocco’s Court of Accounts noted that during 2024 and 2025, financial jurisdictions issued 4,452 rulings, with five percent imposing financial liability totaling nearly 58 million dirhams, while 20 cases involving suspected criminal offenses were referred to the public prosecutor, covering state entities, local authorities, and one association. These numbers point to a system where accountability exists in principle but remains fragmented and reactive rather than embedded in the daily culture of governance.
Practical proposals for a deeper reform
Jazouli does not stop at diagnosis. His book closes with a set of concrete recommendations that are, in several cases, genuinely novel. Among the most striking is his proposal that regional and local council elections be held at least three months before the end of current mandates. This would create what he calls a “shadow presidency,” a transition period during which incoming elected officials can study the files, structure their programs and budgets, and be fully operational from the very first day of their mandate. It is a small procedural change with potentially significant consequences for governance quality.
He also proposes formalizing the consultation of regional councils during the preparation of the national Finance Law, giving territorial governments a structured voice in the budget process comparable to that of the parliamentary finance committees. In a country where the gap between national priorities and local realities has long been a source of frustration, this would be a meaningful step toward coherence.
Why this book deserves a wide readership
“Le pouvoir du détail” is not the first book to argue that Morocco’s governance needs reform, and it will not be the last. But what sets it apart is the precision of its prescriptions and the integrity of its framing. Jazouli does not argue that the ambitions of Morocco’s New Development Model are wrong. He argues that those ambitions can only be realized through a transformation in method in how objectives are set, how people are selected and trained, how plans are built, and how results are measured and shared.
At a time when Morocco is preparing for the 2030 World Cup, deepening its advanced regionalization reform, and positioning itself as a model of governance within Africa and the Arab world, the questions Jazouli raises are not academic. They are urgent. The gap between intention and impact in Moroccan public policy is real, it is documented, and it is costly, in dirhams lost, in trust eroded, and in opportunities missed.
Detail, Jazouli reminds us, is not the enemy of vision. It is its only reliable vehicle.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy.
