Brief Description

The Commission spéciale sur le modèle de développement (CSMD), or the official English title the Special Commission on the Development Model, was a national consultative commission established by King Mohammed VI in 2019 to propose a new development model for Morocco. Its work began on 16 December 2019 when its president, Chakib Benmoussa, then Morocco’s ambassador to France, convened 35 commissioners at the Royal Academy on the outskirts of Rabat [1]. Rather than produce a purely expert led report with little no input from citizens the Commission organised its work around the methodology of collective intelligence, combining hearings, workshops, field visits, citizen meetings, and various online media channels. Across 2020 it received overwhelming input from citizens with more than 10,000 written pages from 6,600 individuals and 165 organisations and directly interacted with almost 10,000 citizens by way of five rencontres citoyennes (citizen meetings), 30 field visits, 70 hearings, as well as 113 expert workshops, 25 conférences labellisées and around 50,000 unique visitors to an online platform alongside the estimated 3.2 million citizens that the social-media campaign was able to reach [2].

Problems and Purpose

The CSMD responded to a double problem. The first was substantive: Morocco’s prevailing model of economic development was widely perceived as no longer fit for purpose. Paulson identifies the following as the principal background factors: slowing of formal-sector growth, anaemic job creation, rising environmental stress, deepening regional inequalities and weakening public-service delivery [3]. The King in speeches from 2017 and 2019 highlighted the existing model as one which failed to satisfy the demands of its citizens, to reduce class and regional disparity and called on the Commission to be sufficiently forthright and inventive to break new ground on a tailored solution given the Moroccan context [4].

Through citizen contributions, that helped sharpen the diagnosis, a few learnings emerged. First participants repeatedly described la panne de l’ascenseur social (the breakdown of social mobility) especially those described above that experience regional disparity and young Moroccans [5]. Other shortcomings described by citizens included the education system, weakness of the social safety net, bureaucratic friction, corruption and rent-seeking. However, despite citizens’ negative outlook and numerous disappointments, local initiatives and an overwhelming sense of pride appeared to persist throughout. Paulson identifies a key contributor to the failing model as the austerity-led reforms shaped by the World Bank and IMF in the 1990s and 2000s, which were understood by citizens to favour urban, financial and commercial interests at the expense of an equitable distribution [6].

The second problem was procedural. The commission of 35 were tasked with producing a credible national development model for a country with 36 million people. This required the collection of perspectives from an exceptionally large number of individuals, thus the Commission employed collective intelligence to answer the question: "how to hold a conversation with 36 million people" [7]? Not only was this model directed towards economic development through the direct input of citizens, which presented its own difficulties [8], but, as Paulson noted in the interview, it was also the first time anyone within the Commission had undertaken such a task. As a result, the plan was not fully known at the point at which the process began, further complicating an already daunting task [9].

Background History and Context

The CSMD emerged within Morocco’s post-2011 political trajectory, which was shaped by the events of the Arab Spring. In the early 2010s, protests and uprisings spread across North Africa and the Middle East, challenging entrenched authoritarian regimes [10]. Although Morocco did not experience the same level of upheaval as some other North African states, the Arab Spring nevertheless prompted a series of political concessions [11], particularly in the form of constitutional reform. These reforms helped pave the way for a more participatory relationship between the state and its citizens, including the decentralisation of power and experimentation with new forms of citizen participation [12] in the form of Réforme.ma, which gathered tens of thousands of online contributions on constitutional reform in a matter of months [13]. Morocco had therefore opened some participatory space for its citizens before 2019 but had not yet normalised the mass citizen involvement in shaping national strategy witnessed in the CSMD.

As discussed above, in 2017 the King declared that the existing National Development Model was no longer fit for purpose, particularly in its inability to respond adequately to citizens’ needs and persistent disparities. In this context, reform became necessary. Accordingly, in 2019, the King announced the creation of a special commission centred on a more participatory approach, stating that its work should be undertaken “by a high degree of accountability... for the implementation of... recommendations... as hard and painful as they may be” [14]. The royal commission was therefore mandated to develop recommendations for a new development model through consultation with civil society and citizens more broadly. In an effort to ensure impartiality, the King appointed 35 members from a range of backgrounds, including scientific, economic, political, cultural and non-profit sectors, as well as a known critic of the state [15].

Additionally, it is useful to situate the CSMD within the wider international deliberative wave that was occurring at the time. By 2019 the Irish Constitutional Convention, Iceland's constitutional crowdsourcing had shown that collective intelligence and therefore national-scale citizen participation in policy formation was possible with enough political will [16] and alongside the CSMD in 2019 the French were similarly embarking on a participatory trajectory with their citoyenne pour le climat. Though the CSMD is not a citizen's assembly in the strict sense it borrowed from deliberative methods and collective intelligence to attain knowledge from Moroccan citizens to inform their future political steps. Because there were very few topics left out of discussion even those usually considered taboo, such as corruption or territorial inequality [17], a narrow focused mini-public set up would have likely rendered insufficient, thus an approach with numerous channels was undertaken in the pursuit of broad participation and cognitive diversity [18].

Organizing, Supporting, and Funding Entities

As a royal commission, the CSMD’s 35 commissioners were appointed by the King and selected “for their scientific, economic and political expertise, as well as eminence in the cultural and non-profit sectors” [19]. However, Paulson was not involved in the selection process and was therefore unable to explain why these particular individuals were chosen [20] over others from different sectors or with comparable qualifications. Internally, the Commission organised its work through plenary sessions, monthly retreats in which site visits could occur, and four thematic working groups [21]. Further, a dedicated citizen-engagement and synthesis unit, the Pôle écoute et contributions, converted incoming public input into material usable by the working groups and the plenary sessions.

In terms of methodological support, Paulson was able to to advise the leaders of Commission directly on collective-intelligence methods and the design of multi-channel citizen consultation [22]. On the topic of funding although an exact budget is not available it was estimated to be in the region of the millions of Euros but not in the tens of millions [23].

Participant Recruitment and Selection

Recruitment combined open reach with targeted correction. At the broadest level, citizens and organisations were invited to participate through official calls to action on the CSMD platform, through ministries, through press releases and later through social media [24]. Over the full process, the online platform recorded approximately 50,000 unique visitors and the social-media campaign reached an estimated 3.2 million citizens [25]. On the targeted side of the consultation process, hearings were held with political parties, trade unions, professional associations, NGOs, and national and regional public actors [26]. This created a channel through which a wider range of policy expertise could be incorporated into the Commission’s work.

The Commission also tried to correct some participation biases. For the rencontres citoyennes, an open registration form was posted on CSMD.ma and Facebook, and participants were then chosen from among respondents to create approximate balance by age, gender and urban or rural residence [27]. Geographic diversity was pursued through 30 field visits across Morocco’s 12 regions, including marginalised mountain villages and rural towns, often in cooperation with local associations, with the explicit purpose of preventing the process from being confined to Rabat or Casablanca [28]. Given that 40% of Morocco's population is under 25 further more targeted calls for contributions generated 3,277 submissions from high-school students, 347 from university students and following another concerted effort another 225 submissions were garnered from prison detainees [29].

Language and accessibility were treated as inclusion levers in their own right. Calls to action were translated into French and Arabic, including the colloquial Darija dialect that allows engagement across literacy levels, and online prompts opened with simple, accessible questions such as what makes you proud of Morocco, what would you change, Morocco in a single word, before moving to more detailed thematic questions on health, infrastructure, education and environment [30]. The limits, however, were substantial. Paulson is explicit that there was “no sense of random sampling” instead it relied on the self selection of citizens across the process as a whole, and that less informed, less literate, less trusting or more apathetic citizens were correspondingly less likely to participate [31].

Methods and Tools Used

The CSMD’s design rested on three principles articulated by Paulson: combining multiple “open” and “targeted” channels; pursuing cognitive diversity through deliberate selection filters and geographic spread; and maintaining an iterative planning process with periodic self-evaluation, with the option of opening new channels in light of what was learned in the earlier phases [32]. Formally, the work was organised into three phases — agenda-setting, co-construction and refinement — though Paulson stresses that in practice the first two ran in parallel because citizens were free to contribute in different forms from the beginning, as well as time pressure to begin consulting stakeholders immediately [33]. Across these phases, eight contribution channels operated simultaneously: stakeholder hearings, expert workshops, field visits and listening sessions, citizen meetings, labelled public conferences (conférences labellisées), CSMD.ma, social media, and targeted written submissions [34]. The online platform CSMD.ma, launched in early April 2020, opened with three broad entry prompts — Morocco in a word, one thing to change, one thing never to change — before offering thematic pages on sixteen development themes and a dedicated regional page [35]. On social media, hearings and expert workshops were livestreamed with open comment threads, and Commission staff treated criticism as a healthy signal rather than as material to be managed away; comment-level concerns broadly converged with those expressed on the platform, even when comments were shorter [36].

Just as important as the channels was the synthesis machinery behind them. Paulson describes a four-step analytical procedure: building a dataset for each channel; cleaning and standardising the data; running natural-language-processing analysis on online open-text contributions through two NLP platforms, one from the International University of Rabat and one from UM6P, allowing the data to be sorted by theme, region, age and gender; and finally producing channel-, theme- and contributor-category-level syntheses for the working groups, with illustrative verbatim quotations [37]. Additionally, the School of Collective Intelligence cross-coded the qualitative in-person syntheses of the rencontres citoyennes with broader online sentiment analysis, while commissioners’ own notes from hearings and field visits also fed back into deliberation, and quotations they remembered often reappeared in their reports, thus Paulson concludes that though heavily qualitative in nature there were quantitative elements involved [38].

What Went On: Process, Interaction, and Participation

The Commission opened its work at the Royal Academy in Rabat on 16 December 2019. Benmoussa’s framing, “our method will be collective intelligence”, set the tone for both the internal deliberations and the external consultation that followed [39]. Internal work began immediately through plenaries, retreats and subcommittees, while external consultation also began early: a pilot séance d’écoute was held on the UM6P campus in Ben Guerir in late December 2019 [40].

Paulson’s interview is especially useful on how these events were designed to elicit frankness. Protocol speeches were kept to a minimum, commissioners sat in a circle at the same physical level as participants rather than on a raised platform, and they framed their presence as listening rather than as delivering official messages [41]. Critical discussion of corruption, abuse of power, territorial inequality, weak social mobility and poor government performance was explicitly invited; only the Constitution (including the basic tenets of the multi-party constitutional monarchy and, implicitly, the question of territorial sovereignty around the Sahara) and religion were placed off the table [42].

Field visits were central to the participatory choreography. The 30 visits across all 12 regions typically opened with a full-group welcome and then broke into small groups of two or three commissioners with ten to twenty residents before reconvening for a restitution and informal conversations. These visits were in retrospect, for many CSMD members, considered to produce some of the most eye-opening insights of the process [43].

Covid forced a major adaptation. Following Morocco’s national lockdown announcement on 13 March 2020, in-person events were cancelled, the mandate was extended from July to December 2020, and the team pivoted to virtual rencontres and online workshops, while strengthening the online platform and launching the additional calls for students and detainees described in the previous section [44]. The themes that emerged across channels were consistent: the broken social elevator; weak public services; failures in education; an inadequate social safety net; bureaucratic friction and corruption; and, alongside this critique, pride in country and a strong appetite to participate [45]. The consultation also surfaced bottom-up innovations rather than complaint alone — local initiatives including the Mahir Centre, the Institute of Aeronautical Trades and TIBU were cited in the General Report as evidence of locally generated promise [46].

Influence, Outcomes, and Effects

The Commission’s mandate ended in December 2020; the General Report — titled in its official English version The New Development Model: Releasing Energies and Regaining Trust to Accelerate the March of Progress and Prosperity for All— was published in April 2021. It articulates five development objectives, four systemic knots, four strategic axes, 72 propositions and five levers for system-wide change, redefining development as a multidimensional process rather than the mere accumulation of wealth [47]. Alongside its substantive content, the report sets out an implementation framework. It proposes a National Compact for Development and a monitoring mechanism placed under the King’s authority, whose stated functions are to publicise the new model, provide instruments, check the consistency of reforms, monitor strategic projects and support change management [48]. The Commission framed the Development Model as one designed “by Moroccans, with Moroccans and for Moroccans”, presenting it as both the product of extensive engagement with citizens and evidence of a broader national demand for participation, inclusion and empowerment [49].

The record of policy implementation is more uneven, however, and warrants care. In interview, Paulson is explicit that the specific policy impact of the report has so far been “very underwhelming”, and he attributes this primarily to the under-resourcing and under-planning of the post-report implementation campaign [50]. He locates the stronger effect at the level of Moroccan political culture and public administration: the experience of the CSMD, in his account, has helped to demonstrate to senior officials that citizens can be consulted at scale without producing conflict, and that such consultation can yield useful outcomes [51].

A suggestive piece of evidence on this point is the post-CSMD trajectory of several commissioners. A number of the 35 entered government following the 2022 elections and went on to use similar broad consultation methods in their portfolios. The clearest case is Benmoussa himself, who became Minister of Primary and Secondary Education and ran a national consultation on public education, working with at least three former CSMD members in his ministry [52]. Paulson adds the caveat that the Gen Z protests of 2025 indicate continuing under-performance of the state in territories outside the big cities [53]. The outcomes summary is therefore best read as a strong national diagnosis and proposal architecture, paired with administrative diffusion of methods rather than confirmed implementation of the 72 propositions themselves.

Analysis and Lessons Learned

This section uses Graham Smith’s framework of democratic goods to evaluate the CSMD against six criteria:

1. Inclusion
2. Considered Judgement
3. Popular Control
4. Transparency
5. Efficiency
6. Transferability

The thesis carried through every subsection is that the CSMD scores well on the goods that operate prior to the decision (inclusion as presence, agenda-setting power, external transparency) however, it falls shorter on the goods that operate at and after decision (popular control over outcomes, internal-process transparency and structured citizen-to-citizen considered judgment). This pattern is symptomatic of a consultative process that carries significant democratic legitimacy, but lacks strong decisional control.

INCLUSION:

Smith treats inclusion as dualistic in that not only does it encompas presence, the people who are recruited, but also voice, whether those people are empowered to speak freely. On the issue of presence, Smith posits that, "no citizen or social group from the given population is systematically excluded from participation" [54], although he does acknowledge that in practice all designs will succumb to limitations such as stratified sampling and database limits [55]. Additionally, on the issue of voice, Smith suggests that a test that can be done is whether the facilitation and group dynamics suppress particular perspectives.

On presence, the CSMD is strong nature. The Commission received contributions from 6,600 individuals and 165 organisations, in addition to the almost 10,000 individuals that were directly interacted with and numerous online interactions [56]. Other efforts the CSMD made to ensure participation was strong and avoided the systematic exclusion of any social groups were field visits alongside targeted attempts at inclusion of high school, university and individuals in the prison system [57]. Although these efforts do seem to adequately reach large swathes of the population Paulson was candid in his concession that less informed, less literate, less trusting or more apathetic citizens were correspondingly less likely to participate [58]. Although this does represent a problem Smith raises in that self selection replicates inequalities of political confidence [59], I would contend that this falls within the category Smith identifies as the inability to fully satisfy goods in their entirety. Although certain groups were likely to have been less incentivised to participate, a limitation that random or stratified sampling may have helped to overcome, the CSMD nevertheless made several specific attempts to include marginalised groups, including those in rural areas and prisoners. Smith's own reference to mini-publics combined stratified random sampling on geography, gender and age with a nominal pay that compensated participants [60]. The CSMD however, even at the highest level [61] were not compensated and thus, the self selection, no pay design narrows access for low-income participants conceding representative ground that stratified mini-publics occupy.

In relation to voice, the CSMD adopted several facilitation strategies intended to reduce hierarchical dynamics, including circular seating arrangements, minimal protocol speeches and the positioning of commissioners primarily as listeners. Alongside the Commission’s willingness to allow participants to speak frankly on previously sensitive issues, such as corruption, weak public services and territorial neglect [62], these choices represent some of the clearest examples of deliberate efforts to facilitate open dialogue and reduce the suppression of previously unbroachable concerns. However, despite these efforts, the Constitution and religion were excluded from the deliberative space. By Smith’s standard, this represents a meaningful weakening of inclusion-as-voice, particularly given the centrality of these issues to democratic life. It should be acknowledged, however, that opening such fundamental aspects of Morocco’s political and constitutional order to public deliberation would have carried the risk of far more radical contestation, particularly if public sentiment had demanded substantial change.

In summary, both inclusion-as-presence and inclusion-as-voice appear to have been carefully considered, with concerted efforts made to satisfy inclusion as a democratic good. However, both contain substantial, though not fatal, limitations: first, the absence of random or stratified sampling; and second, the encouragement of citizen frankness within a deliberative space that nevertheless excluded two fundamental issues that would most directly challenge the existing regime.

POPULAR CONTROL:

Graham Smith's popular control ensures a focus on not only the deliberative element of democracy instead ensuring that democratic institutions include the ability for "citizens [to] have effective control over significant elements of decision-making" [63]. Smith separates popular control into distinct categories under which there is an increasing influence on the change that comes from the democratic process, these elements are: "problem definition, option analysis, option selection and implementation" [64]. He follows this distinction with the most common of criticisms of consultative processes is that participation has little effect on decisions and therefore a marginal, at best, opportunity to challenge entrenched practices. The CSMD's success under the assessment of popular control is largely dependent on the element being assessed.

Problem Definition - High:

The CSMD was largely focused on identifying the issues that mattered most to Moroccan citizens. As a result, citizens had a strong ability to frame the discussion and influence the initial direction of reform.

Option Analysis - Medium:

Although the analysis was carried out through a four-step methodology [65], and therefore remained outside citizens’ direct control, the options considered by the Commission were still in their totality shaped by the experiences, criticisms and proposals submitted by the wider population.

Option Selection - Low:

Given its consultative nature the CSMD did not result in a public vote instead the New Model of Development was delivered to the King with the proposed development objectives agreed upon by the commissioners [66].

Implementation - Low:

The general report notes that the National Compact for Development that will renew guiding principles or accountability and empowerment whilst strengthening the State's relations with development stakeholders [67], however these commitments remain state-led with low levels of citizen contribution beyond their initial insight.

With this evaluation in mind, I would contend that the CSMD’s strongest claim to popular control lies at the agenda-setting stage, with citizen control declining sharply once the process moved into decision-making, implementation and evaluation. Citizens supplied the raw material while the commissioners retained dominant control over editorial and decision-making authority. This represents a clear example of a tension Smith identifies between influence and control [68]. It is unfortunately a double-edged sword in some respects as the royal mandate supplied the enabled the access and national commitment that made consultation of this scale possible while simultaneously restricting citizen participation in the most important aspect of the process.

CONSIDERED JUDGEMENT:

Smith argues that considered judgement requires more than the collection of opinions: citizens should reach reflective, informed positions through learning and perspective-taking [69].

Given this criterion, the CSMD’s strongest example of considered judgment was found within the Commission itself rather than among the wider citizenry. Although members of the public were meaningfully invited to contribute experiences, criticisms and proposals, the sustained process of learning, deliberation and weighing competing ideas was carried out largely by the 35 appointed commissioners. The workload undertaken by the 35 commissioners was exceptional demonstrated by their 61 plenary sessions, five weekend retreats and 430 hours of structured internal work, a time investment that Paulson considers "exceptional" even when compared with the "time-intensive Irish and French citizen assemblies" [70]. This created a reflective, intra-Commission process: commissioners had to listen regardless of expertise or ideology resulting in several CSMD members reporting that small-group exchanges in field visits produced the most eye-opening insights of the year [71].

Citizen-side considered judgement was thinner than at the commission level. The participatory workshops with young Moroccans on culture, inclusion and professional development used facilitated role-play in small groups of 15–20 participants with three to five commissioners which exposed participants to one another's perspectives [72]. Despite this, the bulk of citizen participation was aggregative in which "the majority of contributions took the form of individuals testifying to their own experiences and ideas" rather than encouraging deliberation between participants [73]. Despite this shortcoming, it should be noted that most decision-making power rested with the commissioners. It must be noted that the CSMD had little institutional incentive to ensure that public participation fully satisfied Graham Smith’s criterion of considered judgment. Citizens were primarily invited to contribute experiences, criticisms and proposals, while the more sustained process of weighing evidence and refining judgments took place within the Commission itself.

Paulson notes that a sortition-based deliberative element of the CSMD was ultimately unable to move forward as a result of the volume of written submissions consumed significantly more of the staff's time and resources than initially expected [74]. This would have likely been the natural mechanism for citizen-side considered judgement.

In summary, the CSMD's performance on considered judgement is best read as an asymmetry rather than a flat strength or weakness, though on balance it satisfies Smith's criterion only sufficiently: the design accepted a thinner citizen-side deliberative experience because citizens were never positioned as the final decision-makers. The Commission itself functioned as a reflective, well-resourced deliberative body with significant internal workload; citizens, by contrast, functioned as a wide and varied source of testimony and proposals. Whether this satisfies Smith's criterion depends on how one weighs the two sides. Judged as an expert commission that listened deeply, the CSMD succeeds; judged as a democratic innovation designed to generate informed, perspective-taking judgement among ordinary citizens, it falls short. The abandoned sortition-based pilot is the clearest evidence of that shortfall because the one element that would have embedded citizen-side considered judgement into the design was a process that was never delivered.

TRANSPARENCY:

Smith distinguishes between two senses of transparency: first, whether participants understand the conditions under which they are participating; and second, whether decisions and information about the institution are communicated to the wider public [75].

In relation to the first sense of transparency, Smith raises three questions for assessing whether participants understood the conditions of their participation [76]. The first concerns how the issue under discussion was selected. In the case of the CSMD, this question operates slightly differently, because participants were not invited to deliberate on a single pre-selected issue; rather, they were invited to inform the Commission about the issues, concerns and priorities that should shape the New Development Model. The next question is who is organising the process. At a surface level the CSMD identified its organisers clearly being a royal commission it was mandated by the King with 35 commissioners chaired by Chakib Benmoussa however, the criteria for selecting commissioners are far less clear. Even Paulson, who was closely involved in the CSMD, was unable to explain the reasoning behind these selections [77]. The final question Smith raises is how the outputs of the process will affect political decisions. On this point, the CSMD was weakest. Paulson is candid that the process was unprecedented and that "not even the people who were planning it knew how it was going to work from the start" [78]. Furthermore, although the four-step synthesis pathway from contribution to proposition is described by Paulson [79], I find it unlikely that the average citizen, who is unlikely to be an expert in the area, would be able to follow how their contribution travelled into the 72 propositions.

The transmission of information about the institution and its decisions as a whole was more successful. The Commission used a public website, livestreamed hearings and workshops, sustained social-media communication and published outputs [80]. Social media was used explicitly to demonstrate openness by letting people comment in real time, with staff treating criticism as a healthy sign rather than a problem to manage [81].

In summary, the CSMD's performance on transparency is split across Smith's two senses. Externally, sustained communication through the website, livestreamed hearings, social media and published outputs met Smith's publicity standard. Internally, however, the three sub-questions are satisfied unevenly: the issue was framed openly with participants, the organising body was identified but the criteria for its constitution were not, and the route from citizen input to political decision was the weakest link.

EFFICIENCY:

Smith treats efficiency as a contextual cost-benefit question, comparing the burden placed on citizens and institutions against the perceived effectiveness of the design and against the alternative of not embedding participation [82]. He warns explicitly that "participation on the cheap is likely to be of a poor standard" and that resourced participation is what enables capacity-building [83].

On organiser efficiency the CSMD was impressive. In roughly twelve months, despite Covid disruption, it produced a national diagnosis, gathered over 10,000 pages of written input, interacted directly with 9,700 citizens and delivered a broad national strategy with 72 propositions [84]. Paulson's interview assessment is that resources appeared efficiently used for the quality of the final report, though he could not confirm the budget and estimated it in the low millions of euros equivalent [85]. In fact, Paulson believed that given even the commissioners were likely to have only been compensated for their housing or transport needs [86], it was instead the post-report implementation campaign that was under-resourced [87].

For participants, efficiency is mixed in ways that map back to inclusion. Online prompts and social media allow for low-intensity participation, and field visits reduced the need for citizens to travel to Rabat or Casablanca. These channels lowered the time and travel costs of participating, particularly for citizens at a geographic or economic distance from formal political life. The CSMD did not, however, offset participant time through honoraria or stipends. Efficiency for participants therefore rested on the accessibility of the CSMD’s participatory channels rather than on direct reimbursement, and in this respect the process performed well through the measures outlined above.

TRANSFERABILITY:

Smith asks three transferability questions: across scale, across political system, and across issue type [88]. Applied to the CSMD, the listening architecture and the authority structure transfer very differently.

The listening architecture is highly transferable. Its multi-channel design, combination of open and targeted outreach, accessible multilingual prompts, field visits across the territory and iterative self-evaluation generalise beyond Morocco. Paulson explicitly argues that these principles apply elsewhere, including the United Kingdom [89]. Furthermore the self-evaluative design pausing in May 2020 to review who was contributing and adding student and prisoner calls in response [90] is itself a transferable principle independent of the Moroccan context.

The authority structure is not equally transferable. The CSMD depended on a royal mandate that opened doors, gave the process national weight and enabled the Commission to speak with cross-sectoral authority. In parliamentary or electoral systems, an equivalent legitimacy carrier would be needed: parliament, government, an independent public body or a referendum mechanism. Without such anchoring, the CSMD design risks reproducing consultation without control.

In summary, the CSMD's transferability splits along the same fault line that runs through the case as a whole: the listening architecture travels well across all three of Smith's transferability questions, while the royal authority structure is constrained on each. The multi-channel design, multilingual outreach, field visits and iterative self-evaluation can be adapted at different scales, fitted into different political systems and applied to a wide range of issue types. The royal mandate, by contrast, supplied weight at national scale but is bound to political systems with comparable executive authority, and is best suited to broad strategic questions rather than to binding or contested decisions. Replicating the design elsewhere would therefore demand an equivalent legitimacy anchor and a clearer route from contribution to public decision.

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Notes

I believe there is a spelling mistakes on the title of the CSMD summary report however, I have used the title as it has appeared in the document.

1. Developpment - I take to have meant development