Resistance to change in the Moroccan public administration: the case of the citizen customer

Abstract

Public administration reforms have been, and continue to be a major component of the Moroccan development model. For several decades, Morocco has undertaken a series of attempts to reform its public administration but, despite some progress, these attempts have not yet been able to reach the objectives set in advance. This observation made us wonder why these initiatives did not succeed at a time when having a modern public administration has become an obligation. The objective of this research is to focus on the relationship between resistance to change as a phenomenon and the failure of administrative reform initiatives.  In order to answer this question, we chose to use a qualitative study via semi-directive interviews with citizens who contacted the provincial tax office Mohammedia-Benslimane, chosen as a reference model for public administrations.

The processing of the collected data, assisted by the Nvivo 11 software, helped us to observe that resistance to change constitutes a major obstacle to the success of any administrative reform policy given that the Moroccan public administration official is not yet ready to cut with the old practices that find their legitimacy in the traditional bureaucratic model.

It should be noted that the study only dealt with one variable among several that lead to the failure of administrative reforms and only concerned one public administration, the Mohammedia-Benslimane provincial tax office. However, this study has given us an idea of the mentality of the Moroccan public employee, which should be taken into account when implementing administrative reforms.

JEL Classification : H12,P41, D23.

Paper type : Empirical research.