Person:
Ababsa, Myriam

Global Practice on Governance
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Ababsa, Myriam, Ababsa, Meriem
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Global Practice on Governance
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Last updated: January 31, 2023
Biography
Myriam Ababsa is a social geographer based in Jordan since 2000. A former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and of the Department of Geography at the Sorbonne, she holds a PhD in Geography from the University François Rabelais of Tours. She was a researcher at the French Institute for the Near-East, where she directed the “Atlas of Jordan: History, Territories, Society”. Her work focuses on the impact of public policies on regional and urban development in Jordan and Syria. She researches governance, public participation in housing policies and services delivery. She is the author of « Amman de pierre et de paix » (Paris: Autrement, 2007), « Raqqa, territoires et pratiques sociales d’une ville syrienne » (Beirut: IFPO, 2009). She has co-edited with Rami Daher “Cities, Urban Practices and Nation Building in Jordan” (Beirut: IFPO, 2011 ) and co-edited  “Popular Housing and Urban Land Tenure in the Middle East” (University of Cairo Press, 2012).

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    Metropolitan Amman: Comprehensive Climate Plans
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-11-13) Hussein, Ahmad Z. Abu; Ababsa, Myriam
    Globally, cities are the source of over 70 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. Cities are also the engines of the global economy, concentrating more than half the world’s population, and they are where the middle class is rapidly expanding. Indeed, by the year 2050, two-thirds of the world will be urban, with cities accommodating an additional 2.5 billion people over today’s total. Nearly all of this urban growth will occur in developing countries. This concentration of people and assets also means that the impacts of natural disasters, exacerbated by the changing climate, may be even more devastating, both in terms of human lives lost and economic livelihoods destroyed. These effects will disproportionately burden the poor. Earth is on a trajectory of warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius unless important decarbonizing steps are taken.Often urban policymakers prescribe integration as the solution to steering urbanization towards decarbonization to achieve greater global and local environmental benefits. However, little is known about the struggles—and successes—that cities in developing countries have in planning, financing, and implementing integrated urban solutions. The main objective of this report is to understand how a variety of developing and emerging economies are successfully utilizing horizontal integration—across multiple infrastructure sectors and systems—at the metropolitan scale to deliver greater sustainability. This report explores how integrated planning processes extending well beyond city boundaries have been financed and implemented in a diverse group of metropolitan areas. From this analysis, the report derives models, poses guiding questions, and presents three key principles to provoke and inspire action by cities around the world.
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    Rules on Paper, Rules in Practice: Enforcing Laws and Policies in the Middle East and North Africa
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2016-07-19) Sergenti, Ernest; Al-Dahdah, Edouard; Corduneanu-Huci, Cristina; Raballand, Gael; Ababsa, Myriam
    The primary focus of this book is on a specific outcome of the rule of law: the practical enforcement of laws and policies, and the determinants of this enforcement, or lack thereof. Are there significant and persistent differences in implementation across countries? Why are some laws and policies more systematically enforced than others? Are “good” laws likely to be enacted, and if not, what stands in the way? We answer these questions using a theoretical framework and detailed empirical data and illustrate with case studies from Morocco, Tunisia and Jordan. We believe that the best way to understand the variation in the drafting and implementation of laws and policies is to examine the interests and incentives of those responsible for these tasks – policymakers and bureaucrats. If laws and their enforcement offer concrete benefits to these ruling elites, they are more likely to be systematically enforced. If they don't, implementation is selective, discretionary, if not nil. Our first contribution is in extending the application of the concept of the rule of law beyond its traditional focus on specific organizations like the courts and the police, to economic sectors such as customs, taxation and land inheritance, in a search for a direct causal relationship with economic development outcomes. Instead of limiting ourselves to a particular type of organization or a legalistic approach to the rule of law, we present a broader theory of how laws are made and implemented across different types of sectors and organizations. Our second contribution is in demonstrating how powerful interests affect implementation outcomes. The incentives elites have to build and support rule-of-law institutions derive from the distribution of power in society, which is partly a historical given. The point we make is that it is not deterministic. Realigning the incentive structures for reform among key actors and organizations, through accountability and competition, can dramatically improve the chances that rule-of-law institutions will take root. On the other hand, building the capacity of organizations without first changing institutional incentives is likely to lead to perverse outcomes.