Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Medit ...

has a

centralised Centralisation or centralization (see spelling differences) is the process by which the activities of an organisation, particularly those regarding planning and decision-making, framing strategy and policies become concentrated within a particu ...

system of

local government Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of public administration within a particular sovereign state. This particular usage of the word government refers specifically to a level of administration that is both geographically-l ...

officially called local administration as it is a branch of the Executive. The country is divided into twenty-seven governorates ( '; ; genitive case: ; plural: '), the top tier of local administration. A governorate is administered by a

governor A governor is an administrative leader and head of a polity or political region, ranking under the head of state and in some cases, such as governors-general, as the head of state's official representative. Depending on the type of political ...

, who is appointed by the

President of Egypt The president of Egypt is the executive head of state of Egypt and the de facto appointer of the official head of government under the Egyptian Constitution of 2014. Under the various iterations of the Constitution of Egypt following the E ...

and serves at the president's discretion. Governors have the civilian rank of minister and report directly to the

prime minister A prime minister, premier or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. Under those systems, a prime minister i ...

, who chairs the Board of Governors ''(majlis al-muhafzin)'' and meets with them on a regular basis. The Minister of Local Development coordinates the governors and their governorate's budgets.

Overview

Egypt generally has four tiers of local administration units: governorates, cities, counties ''(marakiz)'', districts (subdivisions of cities) and villages (subdivisions of counties). There is a tier between the national government and the governorates termed Economic Regions, though it does not have any administrative structure and serves only for economic planning purposes. In addition to these tiers are two main exceptions. New Urban Communities, are

satellite cities Satellite cities or satellite towns are smaller municipalities that are adjacent to a principal city which is the core of a metropolitan area. They differ from mere suburbs, subdivisions and especially bedroom communities in that they have m ...

that are built and operated by the national level New Urban Communities Authority (NUCA). Its chairman, the Minister of Housing, Utilities and Urban Communities issues planning permits and oversees the communities, while the appointed city agency heads issue building permits and run the day to day affairs of functioning towns . While NUCA is legally obliged to transfer these communities to mainstream local administration once they are developed, none have been since its inception in 1979. The other exception are new villages built by the Ministry of Agriculture'
General Authority for Rehabilitation Projects and Agricultural Development
(GARPAD) in its desert land reclamation schemes, which are initially under its jurisdiction and should eventually be transferred to local authorities. At the highest tier, there are three

city-state A city-state is an independent sovereign city which serves as the center of political, economic, and cultural life over its contiguous territory. They have existed in many parts of the world since the dawn of history, including cities such as ...

governorates,

Cairo Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the Capital city, capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, List of ...

, Port Said, and

Suez Suez ( ar, السويس '; ) is a seaport city (population of about 750,000 ) in north-eastern Egypt, located on the north coast of the Gulf of Suez (a branch of the Red Sea), near the southern terminus of the Suez Canal, having the same bou ...

, where the governor is also head of the city and lower units are 100%

urban Urban means "related to a city". In that sense, the term may refer to: * Urban area, geographical area distinct from rural areas * Urban culture, the culture of towns and cities Urban may also refer to: General * Urban (name), a list of people ...

Alexandria Alexandria ( or ; ar, ٱلْإِسْكَنْدَرِيَّةُ ; grc-gre, Αλεξάνδρεια, Alexándria) is the second largest city in Egypt, and the largest city on the Mediterranean coast. Founded in by Alexander the Great, Alexandri ...

is a quasi -city-state also with a merged city-governorate unit, though with one rural county (''markaz''). The other 23 governorates are formed of

counties A county is a geographic region of a country used for administrative or other purposesChambers Dictionary, L. Brookes (ed.), 2005, Chambers Harrap Publishers Ltd, Edinburgh in certain modern nations. The term is derived from the Old French ...

(''marakiz'', sing. ''markaz'') composed of one city acting as the local administrative capital, overseeing other smaller cities (actually towns) as well as rural units (''al-wihdat al-rifiyah'') that are

villages A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town (although the word is often used to describe both hamlets and smaller towns), with a population typically ranging from a few hundred to ...

. The county-city heads (''raies markaz wa madina'') are appointed by the governor, where one county-city serves as the governorate capital and seat of the governor. Two new governorates were created in April 2008: Helwan and 6th of October. In April 2011, however, the 6th of October and Helwan governorates were again incorporated into the Giza and

Governorates, respectively. Luxor was created in December 2009, to be the 29th governorate of Egypt, but with the abolition of the 6th of October and Helwan governorates, the number of governorates has decreased to 27.

History

Before the 1952 Egyptian revolution, state penetration of the rural areas was limited by the power of local notables. Under Nasser, land reform reduced those notables' socioeconomic dominance, and the peasants were incorporated into cooperatives which transferred mass dependence from landlords to the government. The extension of officials into the countryside permitted the regime to bring development and services to the village. The local branches of the ruling party, the Arab Socialist Union (ASU), fostered a certain peasant political activism and coopted the local notables — in particular the village headmen — and checked their independence from the regime. State penetration did not retreat under Sadat and

Mubarak Muhammad Hosni El Sayed Mubarak, (; 4 May 1928 – 25 February 2020) was an Egyptian politician and military officer who served as the fourth president of Egypt from 1981 to 2011. Before he entered politics, Mubarak was a career officer in t ...

. The earlier effort to mobilize peasants and deliver services disappeared as the local party and cooperative withered, but administrative controls over the peasants remained intact. The local power of the old families and the headmen revived but more at the expense of peasants than of the state. The district police station balanced the notables, and the system of local government (the mayor and council) integrated them into the regime. Until 1979, local government enjoyed limited power in Egypt's highly centralized state. Under the central government, there were twenty-six governorates (27 today), which were subdivided into counties (In ar, مركز ' "center", plural: '), each of which was further subdivided into towns or villages. At each level, there was a governing structure that combined representative councils and government-appointed executive organs headed by governors, district officers, and mayors, respectively. Governors were appointed by the president, and they, in turn, appointed subordinate executive officers. The coercive backbone of the state apparatus ran downward from the

Ministry of Interior An interior ministry (sometimes called a ministry of internal affairs or ministry of home affairs) is a government department that is responsible for internal affairs. Lists of current ministries of internal affairs Named "ministry" * Ministry ...

through the governors' executive organs to the district police station and the village headman. Sadat took several measures to administratively decentralize power to the provinces and towns, with limited fiscal and almost no political decentralisation. Governors acquired more authority under Law 43/1979, which reduced the administrative and budgetary controls of the central government over the provinces. The elected councils acquired, at least formally, the right to approve or disapprove the local budget. In an effort to reduce local demands on the central treasury, local government was given wider powers to raise local taxes. Local representative councils became vehicles of pressure for government spending, and the soaring deficits of local government bodies had to be covered by the central government. Local government was encouraged to enter into joint ventures with private investors, and these ventures stimulated an alliance between government officials and the local rich that paralleled the

infitah ''Infitah'' ( ar, انفتاح ', "openness") or Law 43 of 1974 was Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's policy of "opening the door" to private investment in Egypt in the years following the 1973 October War (Yom Kippur War) with Israel. Infitah ...

alliance at the national level. Under president Hosni Mubarak's rule (1981-2011), some scholars believed decentralization and local autonomy was achieved, and local policies often reflected special local conditions. Thus, officials in Upper Egypt often bowed to the powerful Islamic movement there, while those in the port cities struck alliances with importers." However, others found local governance proved impotent, with parliamentarians reduced to the roles of local councillors, lobbying at the

parliamentary A parliamentary system, or parliamentarian democracy, is a system of democratic governance of a state (or subordinate entity) where the executive derives its democratic legitimacy from its ability to command the support ("confidence") of the ...

level for basic local services, while the elected Local Popular Councils (LPC) had a parallel ceremonial role to the appointed Local Executive Councils (LEC) that managed the local departments. Elections of the LPCs have also been observed to be fraudulent where the ruling National Democratic Party NDP won 95 percent of local council seats during the last election in 2008, and 84 percent of the seats were walkovers. After Mubarak was deposed by the popular uprising of January 2011, parliament and local councils were dissolved pending the writing of a new

constitution A constitution is the aggregate of fundamental principles or established precedents that constitute the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and commonly determine how that entity is to be governed. When these princ ...

. The short-lived 2012 constitution and the current 2014 version gave wider local power through more decentralisation. However, till the end of 2022, it has not been implemented as the government has drawn out the process of drafting a new local administration law leaving LPC seats vacant for over a decade.