Deconstructing the Central Legacy: Multi-Level Governance in Syria

Executive Summary
Following the collapse of the Assad regime and amid competing visions for Syria’s transitional future, the question of how power should be distributed across Syria’s territory has returned to the forefront. To answer this question, it is useful to consider a concept that emerged a few years ago: multi-level governance. This concept serves as a framework for analyzing the mechanisms for delimitation of powers and decision-making among national, regional, and local institutions. It can also be used as a critical lens to assess past failures and explore future governance models. Multi-level governance is not simply a matter of administrative design; it is a political issue that touches on representation and inclusion of all segments of society, local decision-making capacity, and accountability.
In the Syrian context, formal decentralization efforts were regularly undermined by formal and informal control by the center. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the political economy of governance at various levels is crucial to designing a stable and inclusive transition.
The Ottoman vilayet system combined central appointment with forms of local advisory councils, creating a solid precedent for hierarchical governance administered from the center and using local governance layers to balance each other to limit any separatist tendencies. Studying this Ottoman system provides an important historical perspective for understanding the long-standing tensions between the imperatives of territorial cohesion and local decision-making autonomy—tensions that remain central to discussions about designing governance systems in post-conflict Syria.
The French Mandate’s contradictory approach—political fragmentation managed through central administrative institutions—contributed to laying the foundations for the very unitary state that France sought to prevent. The shallowness of local institutions and the centralization of decision-making led to the emergence of a national political economy in which localities were governed at the behest of the center and unable to represent its interests. The legacy of this model continues to cast a shadow over Syria’s governance dilemmas to this day.
While Syria’s early years after independence marked a break with colonial fragmentation projects, it did not replace that legacy with genuine institutional pluralism. Rather, it established a highly centralized governance system aimed at preserving the hegemony of the ruling elites in the capital. This model was based on legislative instruments, bureaucratic oversight, and a centralized political tendency that remained entrenched in the structure of the Syrian state over the following decades.
Central authority was layered, not hierarchical. Despite the characterization of the Syrian regime under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar as a centralized or personalist regime, power was actually distributed across a dense network of intermediary institutions—such as the Ba’ath Party, the security services, government ministries, parliament, and informal patronage networks.
The governance system under the Assads was functionally disorganized, rife with corruption, and lacking genuine popular participation. Conversely, it established a vast network of administrative and legal norms that created constraints linked to routine and administrative processes deeply rooted in the political economy of governance. Consequently, they could not easily be eliminated by the fall of the regime or by partial legal reforms.
Recentralization risks reproducing authoritarianism. Pressures may arise during the transitional phase to rebuild the state by refocusing on central authority to achieve efficiency, stability, or national unity. However, if this occurs without institutional controls and institutional strength at the local level, as well as without financial, administrative, and political guarantees at the subnational level, it opens the door wide to the reproduction of the same clientelist and authoritarian structures that characterized the Baath era, albeit in a new ideological form. Dismantling the Baath legacy requires a comprehensive strategy that cannot be limited to amending the local administration law or holding elections. Rather, it must include redrafting the constitutional definition of state institutions, the distribution of powers, and reforming a wide range of central institutions, such as the judiciary, the central bank, financial systems, and security sector reform. Without such a comprehensive, gradual strategy, any reform efforts will remain vulnerable to containment by old and new power structures, or may create governance vacuums that increase the likelihood of instability.