Democracy and Governance Studies

Andrew Mandelbaum is an independent consultant in Morocco and a 2008 graduate of the Democracy & Governance M.A. program at Georgetown. As a student, he focused on Arabic and political institutions while researching collective action in Morocco's Party of Justice and Development and working at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Before starting graduate school, Andrew worked at the Center for Democracy on trilingual policy papers related to the Israel-Palestine conflict.  He earned his B.A. in Public Policy Studies in 2003 from Duke University.

Mandelbaum moved to Morocco in the summer of 2008 to work on the State University of New York's evaluation of USAID's Parliamentary Support Project. From June 2008 to January 2009, he interviewed over 40 stakeholders and presented findings to representatives of USAID, the U.S. embassy in Rabat, and the National Democratic Institute.

Why did you decide to move to Morocco when you graduated?  What has it been like living and working there?

My decision to move to Morocco came on the heels of a trip to Rabat – Morocco’s capital and my present home – with DG Program Director Dan Brumberg.   I was a research assistant on Dan’s project on political oppositions and pact making in the Arab world at the US Institute of Peace.   I had been tasked with keeping our researcher in Morocco up-to-date on what was being said in the newspapers of Moroccan Islamist groups.  Dan encouraged me to incorporate this work into my studies at Georgetown.  So when we held a conference in Morocco as part of the project, I stayed on to conduct interviews related to my research on Islamist politics.

Having gained a level of expertise in Moroccan politics, the trip cemented my interest in returning.  For one, Morocco has beaches, mountains, and desert – so there is a lot to do here.  Also, I had come to view Morocco as a fairly good arena (comparative to the region, at least) for democracy promotion.  Morocco has several well-established political parties, a vibrant media, and some pushy NGOs.  The regime is relatively liberal.  Couple all that with my desire to continue to learn more Arabic (although I would have to learn Moroccan colloquial and forever tarnish my beautiful Modern Standard Arabic) and it all just sort of made sense.

Living and working in Morocco have been great, although a bit different than anticipated.  Having previously lived in Jordan for a year, I expected Morocco to be more “Arab.”  I thought I was going to spend the summer drinking fresh-squeezed mango juice and listening to my favorite Lebanese and Egyptian singers.  Au contraire.  Morocco has some milk-based smoothies, but the music scene is dominated by house and gnaoua, a traditional music from Amazighi (Berber) culture.   So while I may never become a fan of avocado-milk-juice and house music continues to sound all the same, I’ve embraced gnaoua and gnaoua fusion.

Work-wise, I expected the Moroccan Parliament to be more vibrant than I’ve found it to be.  I had originally theorized that the Parliament’s weaknesses are primarily caused by the budgetary constraints placed upon it by the Monarchy via the government.  Now I have come to believe that, although starved for resources, the Parliament’s problems lie in its own dysfunction.   It routinely hands back money that it has not used and political parties are so divided that they cannot even manage to put together a coherent campaign to demand more funding.  Most efforts by democracy promoters to bolster the parliamentary administration are slowly laid to rest in the maze of unaccountability that results from parliamentary leaders’ strict hold on power.   The political parties, which have been dominated by the same old men for decades, add to the problem.  They prevent renewal while facilitating fragmentation and the patriarchal vision of the Monarchy.  The lone exception is the PJD, Morocco’s “Islamist” political party, which is relatively accountable and has the only solid, democratic party structure.  But the PJD, which has yet to get more than 13% of the vote, has been unable to build any meaningful, issue-based, coalitions with other parties.  As such, there’s little prospect of any serious, non-regime-led reform movements being undertaken any time soon.  I’d say spontaneous revolts are more likely (like we saw in Sidi Ifni last summer), but we’ll see what happens with the economy, which has been relatively insulated so far, starts to feel the effects of the world economic crisis.

Will you describe your current project(s)?

USAID has been providing assistance to Morocco for over 50 years in just about every sphere of the development sector: democracy and governance, economic growth, public health, education, etc.  As a donor, USAID does not do the field work itself, even though it has a field office.  Rather, it provides assistance in the form of grants or contracts to non-governmental organizations and private companies that then implement the project that USAID has requested.  Thus far, my work has been with these subcontractors and grantees, who work with Moroccan governmental institutions, businesses, civil society organizations, schools, etc. to execute the designed task.

I have two consulting contracts at present and am likely to have a third directly with USAID in the coming month.  The first is with DAI, which is implementing USAID’s Improving the Business Climate in Morocco Project.  DAI has hired me to assist a Moroccan center for business mediation to implement its business plan and translate its website from French and Arabic into English.  The second contract is with the Center for International Development at the State University of New York, Albany, which is implementing USAID’s Parliamentary Support Project.  For this consultancy I am assisting the Project’s monitoring and evaluation efforts and analyzing its performance monitoring plan (PMP), a tool used by all USAID-funded organizations to gauge the progress of their work.  The third contract, which has not yet been finalized, will be related to the Moroccan Parliament and the experiences of the Parliamentary Support Project.

The process of making it to this stage is an interesting one.  Prior to coming to Morocco, I emailed some of the contacts that I had met here on my initial trip with the DG program’s director Dan Brumberg.  Julia Demichelis, who was then the Chief of Party for the Parliamentary Support Project, offered an internship while I was looking for work.  There are few people in the development field – let alone in Morocco – who have the type of theoretical and analytical background in democracy and governance that I obtained as a DG student at Georgetown.  Appreciative of my contributions, I was asked to try to determine the impact of the Parliamentary Support Project on the Moroccan parliament and political scene.  The Project allowed me to design my own evaluation methodology and provided me tremendous access to people, documents, and just about everything else.  I ended up conducting over 40 interviews with Moroccan parliamentarians, parliamentary staffers, consultants, civil society organizations (CSOs), and members of the DG promotion community here in Morocco.  This experience sparked the interest of both USAID and the Embassy, and I was asked to present my research for these audiences as well as for NDI Morocco, NDI’s Parliamentary Interns Program, and DAI.  I plan to publish aspects of this work at some point.

How have you applied the knowledge you acquired through the Democracy & Governance program to your work?

The knowledge and skills I acquired through the DG program have opened up many doors for me.  The evaluation methodology that I designed to assess the Parliamentary Support Project’s impact on the Moroccan Parliament was the culmination of ideas that were developed as a DG student through coursework, my internship at USIP with Dan [Brumberg], the comradery fostered by the many nights spent studying at CDACS, and my close relationships with professors.  And let’s not leave out the Forum and the Democratic Piece – it’s cool to have people like elections expert Matthew Shugart commenting on your ideas from across the country.

In all honesty, I refer to my syllabi all the time when trying to justify the way I look at the Moroccan Parliament and the role that the Project has played in trying to support it.  These range from practical things that I read in [NDI's] Ivan Doherty and [Freedom House's] Tom Melia’s class on political party building to more hefty theoretical ideas from Dan’s [Brumberg] class on theories of political development.  Unfortnately, I couldn’t lug all of my papers to Morocco, but I ask current students on occasion to forward me some things.

What do you miss most about the United States?

I miss the variety of choices in anything that I want in just about any price range.  Moroccan food is great, but it’s mostly eaten in the home so there are few good restaurants.  In my own unscientific survey, 98.3% of Moroccan restaurants serve pizza, salads with some sort of mayonnaise dressing, dried-out skewered meets, and cheap paninis.  Other types of foods exist, but they tend to be pricey.  Choice is something you get here only if you have money.

I also miss football, basketball (especially Duke basketball), and - I’m not going to lie - American efficiency.