This is a promising development, particularly as elections will usher in new leadership at the local level at a time when many municipalities’ capacities are near a breaking point amid the refugee crisis. Not only have local governments been asked to bear the brunt of the refugee crisis in Lebanon—as the national government has been slow in implementing policy since the crisis began—but municipalities are also a key driver of development in Lebanon, a role that now is of the utmost importance.
Municipalities are bestowed with wide prerogatives comprising work of a public character or utility within a given municipal boundary. This entails maintaining public infrastructure such as roads and lighting systems, building and maintaining school systems and hospitals, delivering public services such as garbage collection, urban planning, and engaging in cultural activities. However, despite the wide range of municipal duties, there are numerous structural and governance issues which prevent local leaders from being able to adequately carry them out.
For one, there are too many small municipalities with a weak tax base to be able to carry out their responsibilities as stated by law and be fiscally independent. Lebanon today has more than 1,000 municipalities, up from 708 in 1998, totaling twenty-five times more than Cyprus (which has forty municipalities), a country with nearly the same surface area as Lebanon, and more than twice the number of municipalities as Croatia, which is five times larger than Lebanon. Moreover, 70% of these municipalities have a registered population of less than 4,000 people. Effectively, these municipalities have almost no tax base to be able to generate their own revenues. After all, 90% of the revenues for such small municipalities come from the Independent Municipal Fund (IMF). With such a low revenue stream, these municipalities are not capable of building administrations and hiring the personnel needed to perform their duties.
Looking more closely at existing municipal administrations, one can deduce that many municipalities cannot provide developmental services either because they have weak administrations or suffer from a bloated bureaucracy. Those with weak administrations have a small number of full-time employees, averaging four. Furthermore, many municipalities suffer from vacancies: Four hundred municipalities have only one employee and 87% of municipalities have up to six employees. In other words, only 13% of municipalities—about 130—have more than six employees, a number considered standard for carrying out the duties of a municipal administration. Also, only half of municipalities have bothered to generate a reliable cadre of employees and based on a relatively new survey, 70% of municipalities are in need of new employees. Furthermore, many municipalities rely on part-time workers rather than full-time ones, which exacerbates the pressure on the administrative and institutional capabilities of municipalities. The share of temporary workers to the total number of employees is about 50% compared to 28% of full-time employees.
Weak administrative bodies that are unable to provide adequate services and collect the necessary amount of municipal revenues feed into each other, as local revenue collection is constrained and poor financial resources hinder the establishment of sound administrative bodies. To boost municipal revenues, most of the talk concerning revenue rests on the IMF and whether the government has distributed money from it or not. However, the focus should be elsewhere. For one, it is necessary to highlight the size of the fund i.e. how much money has gone into the IMF in the first place, which remains a state secret. Also, there is a need to discuss the distribution criteria of the IMF, which is currently based on the registered population and revenues collected in the last two years. The current criteria favor municipalities with a large registered population and correspondingly larger revenues collected directly. Since the latter is highly dependent on real estate—rental value fees on residential and commercial units—this means that the criteria favor urban rather than rural areas.
Boosting local revenues should also be a local affair. That is, municipalities must exert efforts to directly collect their own fees. Municipalities rely on thirty-six direct fees, of which three form 85% of total collected revenues. The weak direct revenue collection faces its own sets of challenges that include valuation of real estate, collection of fees, and managing accounts. For instance, most municipalities are unable to revalue properties—both residential and commercial—to revise rental value fees, which is an important source of revenue. Municipalities should have the ability to count the number of both residential and commercial units, develop valuation criteria, and revise the values of properties every three to five years. None of this is happening in most, if not all, municipalities in Lebanon. The problem is not limited to revenue but also budget preparation and execution, as municipalities are unable to separate the different functions of administrative and executive jobs to ensure there is not an obvious conflict of interest.
A key factor that ensures better municipal performance is accountability. This has been undermined at various levels. For one, the discrepancy between the registered and resident population has prevented voters from having the chance to make their voices heard in elections. For instance, there are 42 municipalities whose resident population exceeds the registered population by at least a factor of two. These municipalities have a total registered population of about 230,000 people but more than 900,000 live in them. This means that there are roughly 670,000 people who have no say or voice in municipal affairs. On the other side, there are 324 municipalities whose resident population is less than its registered population by at least half. Such municipalities have a registered population of over 1 million people but only 336,000 live in them. This effectively means that about 700,000 people who have left their towns of origin are either less interested in participating in the election process or engage in it with a different calculus. In both cases, the discrepancy between resident and registered population undermine electoral accountability.
But accountability is not confined to elections. Citizens should monitor and demand that their municipalities provide services to them. This, however, requires that municipalities disclose information more clearly and transparently and that voters organize themselves to study and advocate for better services.
Citizens have often forsaken such efforts and some have called instead for the creation of municipalities whose voters are from the same sect. The logic of the argument is that municipal council members will then deliver services to their constituents who are of the same sect. A 2014 LCPS study challenged such assertions and demonstrated that municipalities that govern areas with citizens of the same sect do not provide more services than municipalities whose voters are of mixed sectarian composition. This suggests that the idea of citizens of the same sect being better off in small homogeneous municipalities is unfounded. Rather, a key guarantor of development is accountability.
The refugee crisis has brought these issues to the forefront as it is often stated that the influx of Syrians has created a crisis in Lebanon, but this could not be further from the truth. The descriptions of local governance offered above would have been as accurate prior to the crisis as after. The reality is that municipalities are the first and most direct link between Lebanese authorities and refugees, and with this level of interaction an opportunity arises whereby local administrations are more capable of playing an active role regarding the policies and projects implemented to help Syrian refugees.
For this to happen, there is a need for proactive central government leadership and vision in dealing with refugees, which supports local governments and designates tasks to them. In this way, the work of municipalities is part of a larger efforts conceived by the central government, supported by international organizations and donors, and implemented by local governments. Based in part on discussions with local leaders and national government officials in the last year, a number of recommendations can be made. Specifically, the central government should help municipalities by transferring money from the IMF in a timely manner so local leaders can have access to needed funds. They could also encourage them to ease the conditions to hire municipal staff. The government should come to appreciate the need to collect data at the local level to design policies that are beneficial to local governments as well. In parallel, oversight agencies must audit the work of municipalities to ensure proper management of resources. In the meantime, donors ought to recognize and support the specific needs of local governments while international organizations must coordinate with municipalities to ensure coordination and complementarity.