Local Governance and Social Cohesion: municipalities as peacebuilding actors in the Mediterranean and neighbouring regions

1. Context and why it matters now

Three conditions make local governance a pressing question for peace and conflict research in the Mediterranean and its neighbouring regions. The first is that displacement and migration are absorbed locally. Refugees, internally displaced people and migrants arrive in particular neighbourhoods, and it is municipal councils, governors' offices and local committees that must provide waste collection, water, policing and dispute resolution. In Lebanon, the 2025 end-of-year dashboard of the social stability sector identifies solid waste as a major driver of tension and reports that weakened municipal police capacity has raised community tensions [5]. The second is that local elections have become both a test and a casualty of political change: they have been held, postponed, suspended or reshaped within a few years in Tunisia, Lebanon, Libya and Palestine [7, 8, 4, 10, 11]. The third is that international actors increasingly use municipalities as delivery channels for stabilisation and social cohesion programmes, as in Iraq's Funding Facility for Stabilization, Lebanon's social stability sector and Türkiye's refugee-hosting municipalities [19, 20, 21].

For the thirteen countries where TIPCS has offices (Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Mauritania, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Türkiye, Jordan, Iraq, Kenya and Italy), the local level takes very different institutional forms, from a two-tier system with 47 elected counties in Kenya [6] to 7,904 Italian municipalities, of which 639 lead SAI reception projects [22, 17]. This report treats these cases together because the same questions recur: what powers and money local authorities actually hold, who they answer to, how far they are trusted, and whether the programmes that route support through them leave behind lasting institutions or temporary delivery capacity.

The report is a desk review of public sources. It is written for governments, donors, municipalities, civil society organisations and researchers. It separates three kinds of statement: documented facts, attributed to their source; interpretations offered by institutions or researchers, which are labelled as such; and the proposal in Section 6, which describes what TIPCS would do and is not evidence. Terminology follows United Nations usage. Figures are quoted as the source gives them, with year and geography, and 'n/a' means that no verified figure was found in the sources opened for this review. Several country cells in Table 1 are empty for that reason and not because the information does not exist.

2. What the evidence says

Decentralisation and conflict: a conditional relationship

The strongest comparative evidence is cross-national and concerns ethnic conflict and secessionism. Brancati's statistical analysis of thirty democracies from 1985 to 2000 reports two opposing effects: decentralisation can directly reduce ethnic conflict and secessionism by bringing government closer to citizens and widening participation, but it can indirectly increase them by encouraging regional parties that reinforce ethnic and regional identities and mobilise groups towards conflict [1]. The sample is limited to democracies, so the findings cannot be transferred automatically to contexts where local councils are appointed, suspended or contested.

Policy-oriented reviews reach cautious conclusions. According to the GSDRC summary of the USAID study by Siegle and O'Mahony, decentralisation affects ethnic conflict more clearly than civil conflict; arrangements that strengthen local legitimacy, capacity and control over spending appear to reduce ethnic conflict, while higher local taxation and formal regional autonomy are linked to more of it; and risk rises where local revenues are highly unequal, where the central government lacks control over provincial security, and where corruption is high [3]. Schou and Haug state that 'no consistent evidence has shown the benefits of decentralisation in the context of conflict'. They note that decentralisation can raise state legitimacy and bring sub-national groups into bargaining, but can also feed separatism, create bases for mobilisation against the centre and intensify local land and resource disputes, particularly in undemocratic settings [2]. A GTZ guideline lists conditions for conflict-sensitive decentralisation: elite support and multi-stakeholder dialogue, capable local leadership, civil society participation, continued central oversight, and reliable, equitably distributed funding [23].

The joint United Nations and World Bank study Pathways for Peace frames prevention around grievances about exclusion from power, opportunity and security, and gives the primary responsibility for prevention to states while calling for the participation of civil society, the private sector and regional organisations, and of women and youth in decision-making [24]. It does not by itself establish that local government is a causal pathway; it supplies the rationale for testing whether inclusive local institutions reduce exclusion grievances. What the literature supports is a conditional claim: decentralisation helps when it increases accountable local capacity and does not create new fiscal or identity-based cleavages.

Social cohesion: concept and measurement

The OECD describes a cohesive society as one that works towards the well-being of all its members, fosters a sense of belonging and counters marginalisation within and between groups [25]. Operational measures vary. The SCORE index, developed by the UNDP-ACT partnership and the Centre for Sustainable Peace and Democratic Development (SeeD) with USAID funding, scores social cohesion and reconciliation by group and demographic category and lists 16 locations, none of which is one of the thirteen countries in this review [14]. Arab Barometer covers 17 countries and territories, including ten of the thirteen (Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Palestine, Syria and Tunisia), with Wave IX dated 2025 [15]. In Lebanon, a regular perception survey run by ARK and UNDP tracks tension indicators; its Wave XI of August 2021 found that 36% of respondents reported negative refugee-host relations, up from 21% in July 2018, and that 42% of citizens trusted municipalities to improve their lives [20]. Comparable municipal-level cohesion data across the thirteen countries were not found.

Participation and participatory budgeting

The most cited evidence on participatory budgeting comes from Brazil. Touchton and Wampler, using an original database on Brazil's largest cities over twenty years, report that participatory budgeting programmes are strongly associated with higher health spending, more civil society organisations and lower infant mortality, with the association growing the longer programmes persist [16]. Further Brazilian studies examine its effects on well-being and on municipal spending and infant mortality [26, 27]. These are observational studies of one country with a particular party and civil society configuration; they show an association with service outcomes, not an effect on social cohesion or conflict. No participatory budgeting evaluation for the thirteen countries was verified for this review.

Networks, diplomacy and local peace infrastructure

United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), headquartered in Barcelona, describes its mission as being the united voice and world advocate of democratic local self-government and supports city-to-city cooperation [28]. Case material suggests that peer exchange can spread practice: after a workshop in Gaziantep, the municipalities of Adana, Şanlıurfa, Kilis and Mersin adopted similar migration structures [18]. In Italy, UNHCR and the National Association of Italian Municipalities (ANCI) signed a memorandum of understanding on 3 March 2024 and eleven cities have signed an Integration Charter launched in 2022 [29]. On local mediation, Kumar and De la Haye discuss national 'infrastructures for peace' as a form of hybrid peacemaking [30], and an analysis of Kenyan electoral violence draws on local mediation and dialogue in the Kerio Valley [31]. No impact evaluation of municipal diplomacy or of local peace committees in the thirteen countries was verified, and the evidence for this strand is therefore descriptive.

3. The regional picture across the 13 countries

Table 1 summarises the local-government framework and the most recent verified local-election or reform development for each country. Cells marked 'n/a' mean that no verified figure was found in the sources opened. The sources use different reference years (mostly 2021 or 2022 for structural counts), so the table describes frameworks, not current performance.

Tunisia: a constitutional promise and an interrupted experiment

Tunisia's 2014 Constitution devoted a chapter to local government [32], but the legal framework took years to materialise. A draft Local Authorities Code was first issued in October 2015 and a later draft submitted to the Assembly in May 2017; until then municipalities were governed by Law 33 of 1975, which did not recognise their administrative and financial independence, and municipal councils were appointed 'special delegations' since the dissolution of elected councils after 2011 [46]. The Code, a 392-article law, was adopted days before the 6 May 2018 elections; the minister responsible said it would 'completely change the development model', while an electoral integrity association criticised what it described as a voluntary delay by some parliamentary blocs [47]. The elections drew a reported turnout of 35.6% of 5,369,892 registered voters; independent lists won 32.27% of votes, and the article also reports that youth under 35 won 37.16% of seats [7]. IFES reported before the vote that women were 30.3% of list heads, while Nouira reports women heading 55.29% of lists [33, 7]; the two figures are not consistent and are not reconciled here, although both sources describe vertical and horizontal parity rules.

Implementation constraints were documented early. A guide published around 2017 to 2018 notes that municipalities face dual supervision by the interior and finance ministries, that governors are appointed centrally, and that only about 4% of the government budget goes to municipalities, compared with 11% in Morocco [48]. In March 2023 the President announced that the elected councils would be dissolved, months before new local elections were due, and replaced by new councils with new rules; the head of the national board of municipalities was quoted saying that the president did not see the point in sharing authority, while the President had earlier described some councils as 'not neutral' [8]. Both positions are attributed here; the report takes no view on them. For cohesion research the relevant fact is that the first elected councils since 2011 did not complete a full cycle.

Lebanon: municipalities as the front line of hosting and crisis

Lebanon has 1,065 municipalities, over 70% of which serve fewer than 4,000 registered voters, around 60 unions of municipalities, and a legal basis dating from Decree-Law 118 of 1977 [4]. Transfers from the Independent Municipal Fund are often delayed: as of June 2025, funds for 2022 and later were still unpaid, and in the 2022 allocation half of municipalities received less than LBP 250 million, about US$2,800 at the time [4]. In theory councils are responsible for every work of public character in their area; in practice major decisions often require central approval, though some municipalities took on extra roles during the crisis, such as fuel distribution and water trucking [4]. Municipal elections were postponed in 2024 amid security concerns [4] and held in four phases between 4 and 24 May 2025, with 1,331 women elected, or 10% of council members, according to a UNDP summary that also flags inconsistencies in some of its own figures [9].

The Lebanon Crisis Response Plan has treated municipalities as 'primary interlocutors' for social stability partners and listed 1,047 municipalities in 2022, of which 244 were targeted [20]. In 2025 the sector reached 1,483,875 people against a target of 3,402,685 (44%), received US$61.17 million of US$200.87 million required (30%), and delivered 138 basic-service and solid-waste projects across 165 municipalities; the dashboard itself notes several internal inconsistencies, including in the number of conflict prevention mechanisms [5]. On causal evidence, Lehmann and Masterson used a regression discontinuity design and found that cash transfers to Syrian refugees in Lebanon did not increase anti-refugee violence and may have reduced it, because aid raised demand for local goods and services and reduced contact with potential aggressors [12]. That finding concerns cash assistance to refugees, not municipal programming, and does not show what municipal service investment does to cohesion.

Jordan: host communities and the fiscal question

Jordan's 2021 Local Administration Law repealed the 2007 Municipalities Act and the 2015 Decentralisation Act, left 40% of governorate council members to be appointed, and reserved at least 25% of elected governorate seats for women [41]. The 22 March 2022 elections recorded a reported turnout of 29.64%, with the lowest figure, about 15%, in Amman [42]. Early assessments of refugee impact focused on municipal capacity: UNDP assessed 36 municipalities in Irbid and Mafraq in 2014 [49]. The World Bank's Municipal Services and Social Resilience Project, as described in its project document, proposed to support 21 municipalities in seven governorates with an objective to 'mitigate risks to social cohesion at local levels' through municipal grants and labour-intensive public works that would employ both Jordanians and Syrians [50]. A randomised evaluation of these works, by La Ferrara, Holmlund and Rosa Dias, was listed as in progress with no results reported [13]. A community protection programme submitted as a good practice describes 21 community support committees across Jordan, but reports results without independent verification [51].

Iraq and Libya: stabilisation and fragile local legitimacy

In Iraq, the 2005 Constitution grants governorates outside a region 'broad administrative and financial authorities' and places the elected Governorate Council beyond ministerial control [43]. Since 2015, UNDP's Funding Facility for Stabilization has operated in five liberated governorates (Anbar, Nineveh, Salahaldin, Kirkuk and Diyala). By the end of 2024 it had received US$1,520,694,627, restored 3,431 infrastructure projects and rehabilitated 38,138 housing units; a 2024 summative evaluation credits it with supporting the return of about 4.8 million displaced people, while national internal displacement fell from 1,744,980 in 2019 to 1,031,475 in 2024 [19]. The same report records that 96,844 people had taken part in social cohesion activities cumulatively, that none were held in 2024, that 23,118 officials had been trained since 2015 and that an exit strategy approved by the Government in December 2024 foresees handover by the end of December 2026 [19]. The attribution of returns to the programme is the evaluation's, and returns have many causes. The relevant open question is whether municipal capacity built under a time-limited facility is sustained after handover.

In Libya, UNSMIL reported that the first round of municipal elections on 16 November 2024 covered 58 municipalities electing 426 council members, with 4,829 candidates and 186,055 registered voters; the Deputy Special Representative called it a 'significant milestone' and said successful elections would show Libya can achieve a peaceful transfer of power [10]. A press compilation reports that later phases in 2025 were interrupted: voting took place in 26 of 63 municipalities scheduled for 16 August 2025 because of attacks on election offices, and a further phase on 13 December 2025 covered nine municipalities with reported turnout of 69% [35]. This is a secondary source and its figures should be checked against the commission's releases. The evidence suggests that municipal elections have been feasible where security allowed, which is itself a data point for studies of local legitimacy in divided contexts.

Kenya: devolution as a conflict-management design

Kenya's 2010 Constitution divided the territory into 47 counties, replacing 8 provinces and 280 districts, with an equitable share of at least 15% of nationally raised revenue and an Equalisation Fund of 0.5% for marginalised areas [45, 44]. Counties receive a formula-based share in which population carries 18% of the weight and equal shares 20% [6]. Grants were 90.2% of county revenue in 2019/20 and own-source revenue about 10% [6]. A Saferworld study of Isiolo County in 2018 found some encouraging signs but also ethnic divisions and exclusion, gender inequality, corruption and weak accountability that it said undermine inclusive governance and threaten peace [52]. An analysis of electoral violence observes that devolution was meant to reduce the stakes of national power but also made county-level outcomes more consequential because control determines access to local resources and patronage [31]. The two sources support a mixed reading consistent with Brancati and Schou and Haug: devolution can lower national stakes and raise local ones.

Italy and Türkiye: municipal reception

In Italy, the SAI reception network, successor to SPRAR, is run by local authorities with public funding and 'remains based on the voluntary adhesion of the municipalities'; Decree Law 20/2023, converted into Law 50/2023, separated asylum applicants (housed in government centres) from beneficiaries of protection (housed in SAI) [17]. At 31 December 2025 the network had 867 active projects, 727 lead local authorities of which 639 were municipalities, and 41,736 places [17]. The Integration Charter involves eleven municipalities, which held 18% of funded SAI places in August 2024; 350,345 people held asylum or protection residence permits on 1 January 2023 [29]. Voluntary adhesion means that reception capacity follows municipal willingness, which is an uncontrolled variable in any assessment of cohesion.

In Türkiye, Gaziantep Metropolitan Municipality reported 446,564 registered refugees and created the country's first Migration Management Directorate, offering free services through community centres, and several other municipalities adopted similar structures [18]. Istanbul's metropolitan strategy for 2020 to 2024 had four objectives (coordination, capacity building, research and data collection, and social cohesion), the Mayors' Migration Platform of 2020 recommended clarifying municipal authority and coordination with central government, and the 2024 country report describes reduced municipal visibility amid politicisation and anti-migrant sentiment [40]. UNDP's zero-waste project, running from September 2023 to January 2027 in eight municipalities in five provinces, uses waste management as an entry point to cohesion and reports contributions of US$4,125,051 [21].

Palestine: local councils under constrained sovereignty

Palestine's local-government system comprises municipalities and village councils under the 1997 law, with elections for four-year terms; the 29 refugee camps fall under UNRWA and outside municipal jurisdiction [39]. Local elections were held in the West Bank only in 2012, 2017 and 2021 to 2022; International IDEA reports that around 61% of West Bank authorities were won by acclamation in 2012 and around 60% in 2017, and records that a 2008 decree-law expanded the cabinet's powers, including to dissolve councils [38]. Ahead of the 25 April 2026 elections, J Street's explainer reported that single lists were submitted in 42 municipalities and 153 villages, a new open-list system, a minimum of 20% of seats for women, and a presidential decree-law requiring candidates to pledge to abide by the programme of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which some groups criticised as limiting free expression [11]. These are reported as documented developments, with attribution, and without a position on the underlying political questions. Turnout and results for 2026 were not verified from a primary source and are not reported here.

4. Analysis: mechanisms, openings and counter-evidence

Four mechanisms through which local governance may affect cohesion

1. Service delivery and perceived fairness. In Lebanon, tension reporting points to solid waste, water and electricity as recurring flashpoints [5, 20]. The mechanism is that visible, unequal or failing services convert background grievance into inter-group blame, so municipal capacity matters to cohesion through the quality and perceived fairness of services. This is plausible and consistent with the Jordanian and Lebanese programme designs [50, 20], but the causal chain has not been tested in a published evaluation in these settings [13].
2. Legitimacy and representation. Brancati and Siegle and O'Mahony both suggest that accountable local institutions underpin whatever peace dividend decentralisation brings [1, 3]. In Tunisia, Lebanon, Libya and Palestine, elections have been irregular, partial or interrupted [8, 4, 35, 38], which limits the accumulated trust that local institutions would need.
3. Fiscal dependence. Transfers dominate local revenue in Tunisia [48], Kenya [6] and, because of delays, in Lebanon [4]. Dependence on central transfers exposes municipalities to central political choices and delays, and the GTZ guideline lists reliable, equitably distributed funding as a condition for conflict-sensitive decentralisation [23].
4. Programme architecture. International programmes route resources through municipalities in Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan and Türkiye [19, 5, 50, 21]. This can build capacity but can also create parallel structures that depend on external funding and end with a programme cycle, as the FFS exit strategy illustrates [19].

Openings for cooperation

Four openings are visible in the evidence. First, there are working models of municipal reception that other municipalities have replicated, notably Gaziantep and the Italian SAI and Integration Charter cities [18, 29, 17]. Second, municipal associations are active in several settings, including the Union of Turkish Municipalities and ANCI [40, 29]. Third, national dashboards and perception surveys exist in Lebanon and could be adapted [20, 5]. Fourth, the independent measurement landscape includes Arab Barometer for ten of the thirteen countries [15], which could be complemented by municipal-level modules. None of these has been evaluated for effects on cohesion.

Counter-evidence and competing interpretations

One reading, associated with the policy literature on decentralisation, is that strengthening municipalities is a route to legitimacy and peace [3, 24]. A second reading is that decentralisation without central control of security, anti-corruption and revenue sharing can entrench local elites and intensify disputes [2, 23]. A third reading, suggested by Kenya, is that devolution moves rather than removes the stakes of power [31, 52]. A fourth, specific to refugee hosting, is that cohesion outcomes may depend more on household-level economic effects, as the Lebanese cash-transfer study suggests, than on municipal institutions [12]. The evidence reviewed does not allow these readings to be separated, and the report does not take sides between governments or political positions.

5. Implications for policy and practice

The following implications follow from the evidence above and are framed as options for consideration, not as positions on contested political questions.

• Governments: where councils are elected, protect scheduled elections and the predictability of transfers, since delayed transfers and postponed elections are documented in Lebanon [4] and interrupted council terms in Tunisia [8]; where decentralisation is being designed, pair it with conflict analysis and anti-corruption measures, as the USAID study and the GTZ guideline recommend [3, 23].
• Donors and UN agencies: plan municipal support with exit and sustainability strategies from the start, as the FFS handover illustrates [19]; fund independent evaluation alongside delivery, because the dashboards reviewed report outputs and acknowledge inconsistencies [5]; and align reporting definitions across partners.
• Municipalities and associations: document and share reception and dialogue models, as Gaziantep and the Italian charter cities have begun to do [18, 29], and publish service-level data that residents and newcomers can verify.
• Civil society organisations: contribute perception data, complaints monitoring and dialogue facilitation under agreed ethical protocols, and avoid becoming a substitute for municipal accountability.
• Researchers: test the service-delivery mechanism with designs that can support causal claims (the Jordanian public-works evaluation is one model [13]), report data revisions and inconsistencies, and build municipal-level cohesion indicators that complement national surveys [15].

6. What TIPCS proposes

TIPCS is an independent, nonpartisan research, dialogue and training institute headquartered in Monastir, with offices in the thirteen countries covered by this report and working in English, French and Arabic. It has seven policies in force (code of conduct, safeguarding and PSEA, anti-fraud and anti-corruption, conflict of interest, whistleblowing and complaints, sanctions and due diligence, and research ethics and editorial independence) and publishes its funding. TIPCS proposes three linked workstreams designed to address the gaps in Table 2.

Workstream 1: a comparative municipal capacity and cohesion dataset

TIPCS would build a comparable dataset on municipal mandates, transfers, own-source revenue, staffing and election history for the thirteen countries, starting from the official and intergovernmental sources used in Table 1 and filling its empty cells through requests to national authorities and associations of municipalities. It would test the hypothesis that municipalities with more predictable transfers and uninterrupted councils report higher resident trust, while treating the association as descriptive.

Workstream 2: local cohesion measurement and dialogue mechanisms

In a small number of municipalities in countries where partners and ethical approval are available, TIPCS would compare repeated resident surveys, adapted from existing instruments such as Arab Barometer questions and the ARK-UNDP tension indicators where licences permit, with documentation of local dialogue forums, committees and complaint mechanisms. The aim would be to identify which practices are associated with better trust and contact outcomes, and to document the cases where they are not, while recognising that association does not establish cause.

Workstream 3: learning exchange among municipalities

TIPCS would convene municipalities, associations and civil society for structured exchange, drawing on documented models in Gaziantep and the Italian SAI and charter cities, and would test whether exchange changes practice by tracking adoption of specific measures over twelve months. Exchange would be voluntary and would not be linked to funding conditions.

Safeguarding and do-no-harm

• Safeguarding and PSEA, research ethics and editorial independence policies would apply to all staff, partners and consultants, and complaints and whistleblowing channels would be available in English, French and Arabic.
• Data minimisation: no collection of data that could identify residents' migration, political or ethnic status to authorities; consent in the participant's language; right to withdraw; secure storage of sensitive data.
• Local ethical review in each country of fieldwork and an independent advisory group, with a documented stop rule if the research appears to create risk for participants or municipal staff.
• Independence and neutrality: TIPCS would not take positions on elections, parties or governments, would publish funding sources and conflicts of interest, and would share findings with municipalities before publication where safe to do so.

Results would be measured against the indicators in Table 3 at baseline, mid-term and end-line, with an external evaluator, and published in English, French and Arabic, including findings that do not support the proposal's assumptions.

7. Risks, limitations and what we do not know

• Source quality. Some figures come from secondary or summary sources: the GSDRC summaries of Siegle and O'Mahony, Schou and Haug and the GTZ guideline [3, 2, 23], a press compilation on Libya [35], an explainer written before the 2026 Palestinian elections [11] and a UNDP summary that flags inconsistencies [9].
• Comparability. Table 1 uses different reference years and definitions; Palestinian counts differ between sources [39, 38].
• Gaps. No verified information was found on Syria, on Libya's legal framework, on Türkiye's local-government structure, or on local election dates in Algeria, Egypt and Iraq; UN-Habitat guidance on decentralisation and the OECD's recent social cohesion measurement frameworks could not be accessed and are not cited; no evaluation of participatory budgeting, municipal diplomacy or local peace committees in the thirteen countries was verified.
• Attribution. Programme results such as returns in Iraq are reported by the programme's own evaluation and are not independently verified here [19].
• Proposal risks. Research in contested local settings can expose participants and municipal staff to political risk; the safeguards above reduce, but do not remove, that risk.

8. Conclusion

The public evidence supports a measured conclusion. Decentralisation is neither a guarantee of peace nor a threat to it; its effects depend on whether local institutions are accountable, financed and connected to the centre [1, 3, 2]. Across the thirteen countries, municipalities are being asked to host, deliver and mediate while their councils are interrupted, their transfers delayed or their programmes time-limited [4, 8, 19]. What is missing is not opinion but comparable data and credible evaluations of what local investment does to trust and violence. The proposal in Section 6 is intended to help fill that gap from within the region, with safeguards matched to the sensitivity of the subject.

Method and limits of this brief

This report is a desk review of public sources accessed on 26 October 2026; it does not draw on primary fieldwork, interviews or non-public data. Several sources are summaries or secondary reports of primary documents, some are older than five years, and a few (a press compilation on Libya, a pre-election explainer on Palestine, an undated guide on Tunisia) are weaker than peer-reviewed or official texts and are flagged where used. Several country cells in Table 1 are empty because no verified information was obtained, and relevant UN-Habitat and OECD documents could not be accessed. Attribution of changes in cohesion to specific institutions or programmes is not possible with the evidence reviewed. Statements about TIPCS are limited to its institutional profile and to the proposal in Section 6, which describes intended work and not results.

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How to cite

Tunisian Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies (TIPCS) (2026). Local Governance and Social Cohesion: municipalities as peacebuilding actors in the Mediterranean and neighbouring regions. Monastir: TIPCS. www.tipcs.org/publications/local-governance-social-cohesion