Séminaire: Quel modèle de décentralisation des services urbains en Tunisie? (6 juin, Tunis)

[Outline of Tunisia. Image by Mdesignstudio via Shutterstock] [Outline of Tunisia. Image by Mdesignstudio via Shutterstock]

Séminaire: Quel modèle de décentralisation des services urbains en Tunisie? (6 juin, Tunis)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Vendredi 6 juin 2014, 8h30-17h30, Hôtel Golden Tulip, El-Mechtel, Tunis

Conférence organisée par l’Association Tunisienne des Urbanistes, la Direction Générale des Collectivités Locales (ministère de l’Intérieur) et l’Unité de Recherche Droit et Gouvernance.

La question territoriale a été au cœur de la révolution tunisienne. Les déséquilibres régionaux et les difficultés d’accès à l’emploi et aux services ont dès lors fait partie des thèmes les plus médiatisés sur la scène politique de l’après 14 janvier 2011. La décentralisation a rapidement figuré comme un principe phare des réformes, d’abord dans les programmes des principaux partis en course vers la constituante (ANC) et ensuite dans les orientations dégagées des travaux de l’ANC. L’approbation de la constitution de janvier 2014, et notamment son chapitre sept sur le Pouvoir Local constitue le couronnement du consensus sur la décentralisation.

Aujourd’hui, la Tunisie a atteint un second palier dans sa course à l’instauration d’un système décentralisé avec l’affirmation des principes de décentralisation, de subsidiarité, de libre administration des collectivités et de participation citoyenne aux affaires locales. Et en même temps, un chantier est ouvert, celui de la préparation de l’opérationalisation de la réforme.

Dans cette perspective, et dans l’attente de la mise en place de structures chargées de mener les débats et les travaux sur les orientations des réformes de décentralisation, l’Association Tunisienne des Urbanistes en partenariat avec la Direction Générale des Collectivités Locales, et l’unité de recherche Droit et Gouvernance et avec l’appui de la Fondation Hanns Seidel, organise un séminaire de réflexion sur les enjeux liés à la décentralisation des services urbains. L’objectif principal étant de rassembler chercheurs, experts et parties prenantes dans des discussions sur les thématiques clés de la réforme, afin de délimiter les contours des grandes questions à traiter. Le sujet principal qui sera débattu dans ce séminaire concerne les modèles possibles d’organisation des services urbains conformément aux nouveaux principes constitutionnels, en partant de l’organisation actuelle de ces services, ainsi que les problématiques que ces modèles suscitent.

PROGRAMME

8h30    Réception des participants

8h50    Allocution d’ouverture

  • Mokhtar Hammami, DGCL
  • Yassine Turki, ATU
  • Mustapha Ben Letaif, URDG

9h10    Exposé introductif

Villes, transition et services urbains, par Yassine Turki, ATU

9h20    Séance  : Panorama mondial et arabe de l’organisation des services urbains

  • Aude Signoles, IREMAM-France: Etat de la décentralisation dans les pays arabes
  • Eric Verdeil, Univ. Lyon: Eau, gaz et électricité: entre gestion sectorielle centralisée et enjeux locaux
  • Aziz Iraki, INAU-Maroc: Organisation des services urbains au Maroc

Débat

10h20  Pause Café

10h40  Séance 2: Organisation actuelle des services urbains en Tunisie: problématiques et limites

Fathi Neifer, ATU: Services urbains et décentralisation en Tunisie

Débat

11h30  Séance 3: Principes constitutionnels et démarches d’opérationnalisation de la décentralisation

  • Mokhtar Hammami, DGCL: Réforme de décentralisation en Tunisie: des principes à l’opérationnalisation
  • Mustapha Ben Letaif, URDG: Enjeux de la réforme de décentralisation des services urbains
  • Makram Montasser, ISG-ATU: Quelle organisation territoriale des services urbains?

Débat

12h30 Déjeuner

14h00 Séance 4: Ateliers parallèles sur les enjeux de la réforme           

Atelier 1: Organisation des réseaux eaux et énergie

Animation: Eric Verdeil, Univ. Lyon ; Rapporteur: Rafika Adhadhi         

Atelier 2: Quels services urbains innovants et quel partenariat public-privé?

Animation: Henda Gafsi, CILG-VNGi ; Rapporteur: Wafa Khaled 

Atelier 3: Organisation des transports urbains

Animation: Rafaa Mraihi, Univ. Manouba ; Rapporteur: Souhir Bouzid   

15h20         Pause Café

15h40 Séance 5: Restitution des workshops et recommandations sur les objectifs et les approches de réforme

 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412