Dr. Hamad Kasasbeh

The 2026 Local Administration Draft Law, currently before the House of Representatives, offers an opportunity to redefine the role of municipalities in Jordan so that their functions are no longer confined to cleanliness, roads, and licensing, but extend to managing place, stimulating local economies, attracting investment, and improving quality of life. Yet the transition from service delivery to development creation cannot be achieved merely by expanding powers and increasing resources, because powers exercised without sound governance may widen waste and weaken decision-making rather than expand developmental impact.

This is why the draft law’s emphasis on governance, fiscal and administrative discipline, clearer relations between the elected council and the executive administration, and stronger oversight and transparency matters far beyond institutional restructuring. The elected council must remain the authority responsible for decision-making and oversight, while a professional executive administration implements its decisions under its accountability. Governance is not another committee or periodic report; it is a framework that defines who sets policy, who implements it, who monitors performance, and who bears responsibility, while also establishing clear rules for budgeting, procurement, recruitment, and asset management so that decisions are institutional rather than personal and protected from influence and short-term electoral calculations.

A municipality does not become development-oriented because of the number of projects it announces or the size of its budget, but because of its ability to turn local resources and comparative advantages into sustainable economic opportunities by identifying barriers to investment, directing land use efficiently, developing infrastructure, shortening licensing times, and coordinating among government, the private sector, and local communities. A municipal decision concerning land, a road, or a permit is not merely a service decision; it affects investment costs, asset values, the distribution of economic activity, and employment opportunities.

I witnessed this reality first-hand while serving as Director General of the Cities and Villages Development Bank in the second half of the 1990s, when the Bank contributed to implementing the Social Safety Package, including improvements to municipal infrastructure and training for municipal employees. That experience showed that finance, however important, cannot by itself produce a developmental transformation unless it is accompanied by capacity-building, competent management, and high-quality planning, implementation, and follow-up.

Governance is no less important for municipalities than it is for companies. Corporate governance protects assets, improves decisions, manages risk, and builds investor confidence; municipal governance likewise protects public funds and urban assets, reduces uncertainty for investors, and strengthens the confidence of citizens and financiers in local decisions. The difference is that municipalities do not seek to maximise profits, but to create public value through better services, more attractive cities, more dynamic local economies, and a fairer distribution of development.

The need for governance becomes even more urgent when municipalities enter investment ventures or partnerships with the private sector, because a poorly conceived project, a contract that allocates risks unfairly, or weak use of high-value municipal land may turn an opportunity into a long-term financial liability. Municipal investment should therefore be subject to independent assessment, open competition, contract disclosure, and continuous performance monitoring so that the developmental role does not become a field for improvised decisions.

Governance also extends beyond internal administrative control by establishing a local development compact linking municipalities, citizens, the private sector, and government around clear objectives and measurable outcomes, while supporting spatial justice by directing services and projects according to need rather than influence. This is why each municipality should publish an annual performance scorecard covering service quality, licensing speed, revenue collection, project completion, debt levels, and citizen satisfaction.

A municipality burdened by wages, debt, and arrears cannot lead development, regardless of how broad its mandate becomes, because fiscal discipline is not simply about reducing expenditure; it also means improving collection, identifying and recording assets, putting underused property to productive use, controlling recruitment, and directing more resources toward productive capital spending. If the draft law is enacted, its success will depend on issuing implementing regulations alongside its entry into force, building municipal capacity, phasing in new powers according to readiness, and linking part of municipal funding to performance.

Approving the draft law should therefore establish a new relationship between the state, municipalities, and citizens: broader developmental powers matched by stronger governance, additional resources matched by more precise accountability, and greater local autonomy matched by measurable results. Only then can the law become a gateway for moving municipalities from managing expenditure to managing outcomes, from waiting for centrally driven projects to creating local opportunities, and from measuring success by what was spent to measuring it by the tangible impact achieved in people’s lives.