Politics Without Process: Administering Development in the Arab World.

• Author: VanDenBerg, Jeffrey A.

Reviewed by Jeffrey A. VanDenBerg

The Arab World is in bad shape. Burdened with self-serving political leaders, unresponsive public institutions, crippling debt, and malignant foreign intervention, the Arab World finds itself at the end of the twentieth century one of the poorest, least educated, and least free regions of the globe. This is true despite the promise of state development plans, rhetorical commitment to economic and political reform, and the benefit of two-thirds of the world's known petroleum reserves.

This bleak picture emerges from Politics without Process, Jamil E. Jreisat's forceful critique of Arab economic and political development. Although sometimes uneven, this concise and provocative book is a vivid reminder of the tremendous waste of human and natural resources by Arab leaders more often concerned with their personal power than with the well-being of their countries. In highlighting the central roles of political leadership and public administration in national development, Politics Without Process provides a compelling contribution to the literature on the post-independence Arab malaise.

The author's central question is "Why have reform efforts not produced the anticipated results?" (pp. 20-21) Jreisat offers a myriad of possible factors, but focuses his analysis on the administration of development and the problems of poor leadership and insufficient institutional capacity. The politicization of public administration has led to bureaucracies rife with corruption and without the requisite management skills to implement and monitor development efforts. Jreisat introduces the matter through a survey of recent administrative reform programs in several states, as delineated in reports to the Arab Organization of Administrative Development (AOAD). The most notable aspects of the reform strategies of Arab states, Jreisat notes, is the absence of concrete means of carrying out the programs and measuring their results. Instead, programs have been limited to applying a "Band-Aid approach to a heavily bleeding patient" (p. 89).

Particularly valuable are the author's detailed case studies of attempts at administrative reform in Egypt and Jordan. These chapters emphasize the constraining effects on development of bloated and undertrained bureaucracies and the lack of political will to cut their ranks and tackle the endemic problem of corruption. Egypt's policy of guaranteeing public employment to college graduates and the...