Set for May 2025 after a nine-year delay, Lebanon’s municipal elections are framed as a return to grassroots democracy. In principle, local councils have the authority to shape vital aspects of daily life: lighting streets, restoring schools, collecting waste, and managing public land. The 1977 Municipal Act grants them the ability to raise revenues and receive public transfers. Yet in practice, these functions are severely constrained by three interlocking challenges: fragmented administrative boundaries, a voter base detached from the resident population, and a depleted revenue base following the collapse of the lira.

In this context, mayors who achieve results do so by bypassing formal systems—mobilizing personal networks, securing grants, and adapting to donor agendas. These efforts, while occasionally effective, are rarely institutionalized and often fade once funding ends or leadership changes. This article argues that without substantive structural reforms—particularly on jurisdictional scale, financial sustainability, and accountability—municipal elections will remain limited in their developmental impact. While politically relevant, they risk serving as vehicles for patronage and elite consolidation rather than catalysts for systemic change.

Structural Constraints on Local Government

Lebanon’s municipal system is burdened by institutional fragmentation, political distortion, and fiscal fragility. First, the country’s municipal map is highly fragmented. Over 1,000 councils operate across a territory that does not exceed 10,452 square kilometres, and more than 70 percent serve fewer than 4,000 registered voters. Councils of this size have a small tax base that can barely generate enough municipal revenue, struggle to hire professional staff, negotiate service contracts, or access meaningful capital. Fragmentation reduces economies of scale and limits planning capacity. Second, a mismatch between registered and resident populations undermines local accountability. In nearly 80 percent of municipalities, most voters reside elsewhere. As a result, elected officials are often more responsive to absentee constituencies—reflecting the preferences of voters who live outside the jurisdiction—than to the needs of residents who use services daily. This misalignment weakens the democratic link between representation and service delivery. Third, municipal finances are structurally weak. Local revenues rely heavily on three outdated charges: rental-value taxes, pavement-and-sewerage fees, and construction permits. Transfers from the Independent Municipal Fund are tied to the number of registered voters and the local tax base—favoring urban, property-rich areas over poorer or underbuilt regions. Since the collapse of the lira, neither local fees nor state transfers have been fully adjusted for inflation, leaving municipalities with shrinking budgets and growing responsibilities.

Coping Through Entrepreneurship | Local Governance by Improvisation

Lebanon’s ongoing financial collapse has tested the capacity of all tiers of government, but it is at the local level that the consequences have been most directly felt. As central institutions faltered, many citizens looked to their municipalities to fill the gap in basic services—from electricity and water to sanitation and small-scale infrastructure. Yet, in a context of extreme resource scarcity and institutional fragmentation, most councils found themselves ill-equipped to respond through formal channels. What emerged instead was a mode of survival rooted in improvisation and entrepreneurialism.

To better understand how local governments navigated this period, The Policy Initiative conducted fieldwork with thirty municipalities that had delivered at least one public asset since 2019. Eight were selected for in-depth study due to the visibility and community relevance of their projects. These ranged from sorting and recycling facility in Batloun, to a rehabilitated wastewater treatment plant in Menjez, a restored fish market in Saida, and critical street repairs in Bourj Hammoud. Each of these projects offered a rare example of local delivery in a context otherwise defined by paralysis.

However, closer examination revealed that these projects did not emerge from institutional resilience but from targeted, often personal, interventions by local leaders. In nearly all cases, success hinged on the initiative of a mayor or council member who was able to activate partisan ties, negotiate directly with international donors, or leverage diaspora remittances. Municipal institutions themselves—technical departments, procurement processes, or planning units—played a marginal role, if any. The pattern closely resembles what scholars of fragile states have described as “islands of effectiveness”: narrowly bounded achievements driven by temporary alignments of leadership, funding, and urgency, but disconnected from any broader systemic capacity.

This reliance on improvisation is not inherently negative. Indeed, it has enabled some communities to secure infrastructure that would otherwise have remained out of reach. Yet the approach has significant limitations. First, it generates a model of delivery that is personality-dependent and non-scalable. Projects are rarely embedded in long-term plans, nor are they accompanied by the regulatory frameworks or budgetary mechanisms needed to ensure continuity. Once the funding ends—or the mayor leaves office—the initiative often unravels.

Second, the logic of entrepreneurship is increasingly shaped by external donor priorities rather than local development strategies. Municipalities, in desperate need of funding, reverse-engineer their proposals to fit what donors are currently supporting: solar panels, waste sorting, digitalization. While such themes are not inherently problematic, they can distort local priorities and shift attention away from more pressing, less fundable needs—such as water infrastructure, drainage systems, or administrative staffing. The result is a patchwork of disconnected interventions, driven more by external timelines than by community consultation or investment planning.

Third, the mechanisms attached to donor funding—such as participatory budgeting requirements, transparency portals, or audit procedures—are often adopted in form but not sustained in practice. Municipal officials candidly acknowledge that once the project ends, these mechanisms are rarely maintained. Portals are no longer updated, citizen committees become inactive, and maintenance budgets are either unfunded or ignored. What remains is a visible piece of infrastructure but not the institutional scaffolding required to sustain it.

Finally, the donor-driven scramble has introduced new tensions between municipalities. With the same small pool of grants available, councils often compete rather than coordinate—undercutting each other to secure limited resources. In some cases, this has led to municipalities submitting overlapping or contradictory proposals, diluting potential economies of scale and weakening the case for inter-municipal collaboration. What emerges is a fragmented local governance landscape in which each council is left to fend for itself.

These dynamics illustrate a broader phenomenon: the rise of neoliberal localism in Lebanon. In this model, the municipality is cast as the front-line actor for service delivery and innovation, even as the resources, authority, and institutional foundations required for that role are withheld. Both central government and international donors celebrate local initiative and community empowerment—but without addressing the structural deficits that make genuine local development impossible. The burden of crisis management is effectively transferred to the municipal level, without the means to address it.

In this context, entrepreneurship becomes both a coping mechanism and a trap. It allows municipalities to navigate a collapsing state—but reinforces their dependence on short-term, external lifelines. It fills service gaps in the moment—but undermines the possibility of building lasting, accountable, and equitable local governance. Without structural reforms to municipal finance, staffing, and planning capacity, these entrepreneurial efforts—however well-intentioned—will remain fragile, fragmented, and ultimately unsustainable.

Elections as a Political Thermometer, Not a Developmental Mandate

The 2025 municipal elections will take place in four phases: Mount Lebanon on May 4, North and Akkar on May 11, Beirut, Bekaa, and Baalbek-Hermel on May 18, and the South and Nabatieh on May 25. This staggered calendar has transformed the elections into a litmus test for political parties ahead of the 2026 parliamentary contest.

Because municipal elections are not subject to Lebanon’s confessional quota system, candidate lists are assembled through informal negotiations among political parties, local notables, and business actors. Development programs are largely absent from public debate. Instead, the elections are about securing influence: mobilizing votes, capturing council seats, and positioning for future access to budgets, contracts, and donor flows.

Observers increasingly describe the municipal elections as a “dress rehearsal” for parliamentary politics—a mechanism for political forces to gauge their organizational strength and territorial reach. In this sense, the elections matter politically, but do little to alter the material foundations of local governance.

What Would It Take to Matter?

The performance of some municipalities since 2019 demonstrates that local government can still act—but only under exceptional and unsustainable conditions. Projects delivered during crisis periods were often made possible not by institutional design, but by individual initiative, short-term funding, and informal problem-solving.

True reform requires more than elections. It requires a reassessment of Lebanon’s municipal architecture: redrawing jurisdictions to enhance scale and capacity, aligning electoral maps with resident populations, and overhauling the fiscal model to ensure stable, inflation-adjusted revenues. It also requires embedding transparency, participation, and accountability into the routine functioning of local councils—not just as conditions for external funding, but as the foundation of governance.

Without these changes, municipal elections will continue to serve as instruments of political competition rather than platforms for development. Councils will remain constrained by the same structural barriers that have long limited their potential—and governance will remain vulnerable to the fragilities of improvisation.