Disruptions and Dynamism in the Arab World

The economies of the Arab region are directly shaped by anemic global economic growth and uncertainties around disruptions including inflation trends, China’s economic future after its pandemic-related slowdown and reopening, rising debt levels, capital outflow from emerging market economies to advanced economies, and the trajectory of commodity and energy prices. Global political pressures are just as ominous: multilateralism and the liberal international order are eroding from within, making it infinitely more difficult to find international compromises and solutions to impending economic challenges. Without strong global political will to find solutions to the growing number of collective action problems, the world will see fewer compromises, more protectionism, and increasing insularity, which are all dangerous headwinds for the health of the global economy and the Arab region.

Oil prices have a large determining factor on the Arab region’s economic health and are often correlated with investors’ confidence in the future health of the global economy. Short-term fluctuations in oil prices do not just impact resource-rich countries but also resource-poor countries that are dependent on workers’ remittances from Arab Gulf states. From tourism, trade, investment, and food prices, the potential positive spillover into Arab economies from a healthy global economy are clear.

While many Arab countries are still experiencing economic growth and projections remain positive, distribution of wealth has not improved: the Middle East and North Africa holds the unenviable record of being the most unequal region. The impact of these global challenges on Arab economies and societies, particularly on resource-poor countries and the most vulnerable people within them, will be significant. Unemployment levels have continued to rise since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly for Arab youth. In the Arab region, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Sudan, and Tunisia are all likely to experience challenges arising from an anemic global economy.

The young demographic profile of the region means that more youth are entering the labor market every year with increasingly weak employment prospects. Despite progress over the past two decades in tackling poverty and inequality, the economic pressures of both the pandemic and the Russian war against Ukraine are likely to reverse some of these gains. These global economic uncertainties will only further negatively impact the poorest and most vulnerable people in the Arab region and aggravate internal political dynamics in Arab countries.

How Global Uncertainties Affect Arab Economies

The health of the global economy is often a key factor impacting oil prices and investors’ confidence in emerging market economies; prosperity in both can positively impact the Arab region either through oil revenue and workers’ remittances from oil-rich countries or through positive catalytic effects on domestic economies. Arab economies are also strongly tied by trade and investment with China, the European Union, and the United States, such that a slowdown in any of these economic heavyweights can negatively impact the Arab region through decreased exports of oil and non-oil products and decreased foreign investment in domestic projects. Tourism, for example—which had accounted for nearly 10 percent of GDP in Egypt before the pandemic—is a vital source of hard currency for the region and employs almost 7 million people. Undoubtedly, the economies of the Arab region are impacted by the gyrations currently being experienced in the global economy.

The projected health of the global economy today is uncertain. Based on estimates from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), global economic growth is expected to increase by 2.9 percent in 2023 and rebound to 3.1 percent in 2024. The IMF revised its estimates to be slightly more optimistic, although growth levels were relatively weaker compared to previous years. The more optimistic revision reflects both China’s reopening from its COVID-19 lockdowns and successful global adjustments to reduced oil supplies in Europe after Russian invaded Ukraine. Western stock markets have surged in line with optimistic expectations of countries battling inflation, but then struggled again as a result of technology company layoffs and bank liquidity scares in the United States and Europe. A strong policy response in advanced economies to tackle inflation helped enhance confidence in their corrective measures, aided by the eventual clearing of supply chain bottlenecks that were created during the pandemic as Western disposable incomes increased and remote work increased demand for consumer goods. Hence, it appears that peak inflation may have passed in most advanced economies, although the same cannot be said for developing and emerging economies, particularly in Arab countries dependent on food imports where prices are already quite high. This all suggests that fears of a global economic slowdown remain prevalent but perhaps the feared global recession will not be as ferocious as once thought.

The state of capital flows is also adding uncertainty about the global economy and, in turn, affecting the health of Arab economies. For example, to cool its own inflationary economy, the U.S. government raised its interest rate, causing capital that is invested for speculative as opposed to productive purposes (also known as hot money) to leave emerging market economies, including many Arab countries. A weakening of the U.S. dollar from a November 2022 peak will help to reverse the outflow of capital from some emerging market economies in the Arab region. Nevertheless, the outflow of capital did result in many states accruing high levels of debt. Unsurprisingly, many emerging market economies and developing country governments sought external financing to cushion the impact of broader economic slowdowns and rising costs of mitigating the pandemic. Market studies suggest global debt is at $300 trillion, and debt-to-GDP ratios have increased significantly over the pandemic years. Many Arab governments have indeed accrued a great deal of public debt to manage the impacts of the pandemic. As interest rates rise, debt service payments have also increased, raising fears that debt sustainability will be a serious challenge for many countries, particularly developing countries and resource-poor Arab countries. This will be a potential reckoning and may hence dampen expectations of high global and regional growth.

The Role of China’s Economic Future

Given China’s significant economic footprint in the Arab world as the largest trading partner to almost all Arab countries, a significant investor in oil and gas and critical infrastructure developments throughout the region, and the leading consumer of oil from Saudi Arabia, what happens in China will invariably ripple across Arab economies (see figure 1). Indeed, China remains one of the largest engines of global economic growth. China is a key consumer of a significant share of global oil supply, and China’s potential for an economic recovery will be an important variable in the future oil prices and therefore also in the economic health of the Arab region. Yet, China’s pace of economic recovery is uncertain.

On the one hand, the end of China’s Zero COVID policy and subsequent economic reopening in late 2022 could eventually provide a stimulus to the global economy and a boost to oil exporters. However, despite China’s reopening, production and supply cuts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries since fall 2022, combined with the overall decreased global oil supplies owing to the Russian war on Ukraine and European sanctions on Russian oil, have meant that oil prices have not significantly rebounded or increased.

On the other hand, some analysts say that China’s challenges are more structural and that it faces both the middle-income trap while facing a declining population. In this line of thinking, lower economic growth rates since well before the pandemic mean that China will fail to return to pre-pandemic economic growth levels. China will not be able to sufficiently boost the world out of anemic economic growth.

China’s potential boost and positive impact on the global economy and the Arab region will be tempered by the broader geopolitical rifts that seem to be escalating between China and the West. This risk of fragmentation into geoeconomic blocs is slowly materializing in how countries are raising trade barriers, foreign direct investment barriers, and subsidies to domestic industries. This geopolitical rift is not yet to a cold-war level, but several developments point toward further fragmentation: the China-U.S. technological war over standards; the U.S. CHIPS and Science Act; the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act, which introduces subsidies for clean energy initiatives that will try to push China out of high-value-added manufacturing; and the prevention of access to Western markets for Chinese technology champions.

Fragmentation is about unstructured great power competition, principally coming from China and to a lesser extent from Russia, that challenge the existing distribution of international political power. Specifically, it is the U.S.-backed liberal international order that is being challenged as the distribution of international power has fundamentally changed. It is not surprising then that fragmentation is accompanied by regional powers, like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and the UAE, exhibiting more assertive foreign and economic policies. These countries are demanding more voice and input into regional affairs while challenging U.S. leadership. The rapprochement deal brokered by China between Iran and Saudi Arabia is exemplary of this type of rejection of the liberal international order. Fragmentation is less about disagreements over the legitimacy and role of global economic institutions—like, say, the IMF, World Bank, or the World Trade Organization—and more about what norms ought to underpin the international economic system.

No wonder then that many countries are resorting to more introverted economic policies that have a clear protectionist tone. This is not the death of globalization as some have sounded, but whether it is called decoupling, friendshoring, or deglobalization, this is a serious policy concern that will have negative global economic ramifications. Undoubtedly, the lurking of populist leaders in the background of many countries, including France, Germany, Italy, and the United States, has further contributed to a political discourse that favors nationalist economic policies and criticizes enhanced globalization. These are all troubling headwinds for the global economy and can result in less foreign direct investment and trade with the Arab world. An introverted West is not good for economic engagement in the Arab region and can invariably impact trade and investment flows with the region. These broader political trends cannot be ignored and continue to add to uncertainty and disruptions in the global economy.

Indeed, it has been suggested that trade, finance, and technology rules and standards may become an arena of further global contestation, which does not bode well for coordinating efforts to reverse anemic global growth. Where G20 coordination was a key political factor that got the global economy out of the doldrum of the 2008 international financial crisis, today’s geoeconomic fragmentation portends the lack of political will to coordinate around finding solutions to low growth and productivity challenges. Economic challenges will only be aggravated by climate change, migration crises, and rising tides of populism. The future needs more coordination to address growing collective action problems. The Arab region benefits from strong linkages with a prosperous world economy and an international political system that can work amicably to find solutions to these forces pushing for economic fragmentation.

Oil Exporters Are More Likely to Be Insulated From Global Economic Disruptions Than Oil Importers

The future of oil prices is an important, albeit not the sole, determinant of the region’s economic prospects. But it is unclear where oil prices are headed. Some have suggested that Gulf countries, and the oil and gas sector broadly, are poised to benefit from a return of capital and direct investment to the Arab region, but it is not clear that this will return to pre-pandemic levels. At the moment, oil prices are currently lower than they were when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Europe had effectively met its oil and gas needs for 2022–2023 despite the sanctioning of Russian oil into Europe. It is not clear if the same could be said for 2023–2024

Fragmentation of the Global Economic Order

If Europe is unable to meet its energy needs this upcoming winter and overall global supplies continue to contract, this could cause an increase in global oil prices, which would benefit many oil exporters and Arab economies. On the other hand, Europe may quickly move to replenish its oil and gas storage over the summer months, continue to develop terminals to receive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from international suppliers such as the United States and Qatar, and continue to move toward renewable energy and conservation.

Low demand for oil and a sputtering global economy does not bode well for the Arab region and will have a domino effect. However, the impact of these uncertainties on Arab economies and societies will be felt unequally both across the region and within countries. The Arab region can be divided into two broad types: resource-rich and resource-poor countries. Resource-rich countries include those of the Gulf Cooperation Council—Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. They are labor-importing countries and will be the least hurt by both global economic disruptions and potential short-term drops in oil prices. Resource-poor countries are often labor-exporting countries like Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan, and Tunisia, and they will hurt the most. Undoubtedly, the impact on countries that are already affected by natural disasters and conflict will be significant. Due to civil wars and the near demise of state institutions, Libya, Syria, and Yemen will continue to face severe challenges to reestablishing their economies.

Resource-Rich, Labor-Poor Countries

In the short to medium term, resource-rich, labor-importing countries are expected to generally fare better than other countries in the region despite low oil prices or global economic gyrations. These countries have decent levels of foreign exchange reserves, which will serve as an important defense against potential economic shocks. Moreover, they are among the world’s wealthiest countries in terms of per capita income, and they have amassed sovereign wealth funds to weather global economic uncertainties. In response to the pandemic, for example, a number of these resource-rich Gulf countries had mitigated possible economic downturns by injecting capital into their economies and providing relief policies to their public and private sectors. Indeed, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have provided fiscal stimulus packages, although Bahrain and Oman have had less fiscal space to inject money into their economies. Nevertheless, resource-rich countries’ relatively small populations allow them to have strong welfare policies, including free education, free healthcare, and high levels of public sector employment, which provide crucial social safety nets in the short to medium term to weather global economic storms and periodic drops in oil prices.

That said, while these resource-rich, labor-importing countries are on solid footing today, if oil supply and demand plateau as some suspect, the diversification away from oil remains illusory in these countries and they will face significant challenges in the long term if they continue to depend on oil for state revenue. Beyond ambitious government plans, such as Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and We the UAE 2031, Arab Gulf states have not successfully found ways to diversify away from oil, because the quality of their non-oil goods and services are often not competitive in international markets. Agriculture is not easy to stimulate in the Gulf’s arid temperature, hence the region is still very dependent on food imports. Manufacturing has not been successful as Gulf countries tend to have small populations that are generally not skilled laborers, and labor prices are high. Tourism is also a widely used strategy in resource-rich countries including Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE as they attempt to find new sources of revenue, and it is an engine for economic development domestically. This in part has also motivated countries to invest in their national airline carriers to act as a hub and spoke for air travel, both internationally and to spur domestic tourism with mega-events like the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar. But when global economic growth sputters, international tourism and travel will also suffer because tourism depends on high disposable incomes and business travel to initiate and promote business ties and development. Lastly, despite attempts and ambitious plans to create high-tech knowledge economies through direct support of research and development in universities and state-owned companies, the Gulf region does not have strong indigenous skilled workers and researchers to make this turn to knowledge economies.

Resource-poor, labor-abundant countries are also highly impacted by the price of oil. Though they do not export oil, they receive workers’ remittances from their nationals living in oil-exporting countries. Egypt has among the largest number of individuals working and living abroad, returning home approximately $31.5 billion in 2021, and the vast majority of these expatriate workers live and work in the oil-rich Arab Gulf region. These workers’ remittances are usually sent in hard currency such as U.S. dollars into the Egyptian banking system and are counted toward the country’s foreign reserves. Other Arab countries have far fewer workers than Egypt in the Gulf, but their workers’ remittances from the Gulf make up a significant share of their countries’ GDP. Averaging the past thirty years, for example, these workers’ remittances accounted for 17 percent of Jordan’s GDP, 14 percent of Lebanon’s, and 7 percent of Morocco’s.

Workers’ remittances are valuable to these resource-poor Arab countries’ banking and financial systems, not only because they inject hard currency but also because they stimulate financial services in the receiving country. There is some academic evidence to suggest that workers’ remittances can promote local development, investment, stock market activities, and GDP growth. Early studies suggested workers’ remittances mainly met the consumption needs of workers’ families, but lately there has been greater recognition that these financial transfers can often be used to spur investment in receiving countries. While a high proportion of workers’ remittances are still used to meet household expenses, an increased amount is being diverted to invest in education, real estate, and small enterprise. If oil prices decline significantly and if the global economy takes a significant downturn, these workers’ remittances will decline with negative impacts for the resource-poor Arab countries. So, not only will oil exporting countries be negatively affected, but their partner countries will be as well­—albeit to different extents.

Many resource-poor Arab countries, such as Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, are also prime international tourist destinations. Egypt’s antiquities, Morocco’s cultural heritage, and Tunisian beaches are great attractions for international tourists. These countries heavily rely on Western tourists, particularly from Europe, which further subjects them to broader gyrations in the global economy. In fact, one of the largest dips in tourism in the Middle East and North Africa throughout the past twenty years was during the 2008 international financial crisis, reinforcing the point that tourism in this region is highly associated with broader global economic health. Of course, regional conflict and insecurity can also have important impacts on tourism. Lastly, rising populism in Western countries and the potential for growing global fragmentation can also have a negative effect on country branding and dissuade tourists from visiting the region.

Another challenge facing many Arab countries, both resource-rich and resource-poor, is their overall fiscal mix with shallow tax bases. Other than resorting to value-added taxes levied on consumption of goods and services, there is relatively less government revenue coming from income taxes or corporate taxes. Relying heavily on consumption taxes is a regressive policy that greatly impacts the poor more than the wealthy. Reliance on taxes on consumption goods when the region may already be suffering from global economic slowdowns or gyrations and when oil prices are low will only add to people’s household bills and increase their ire of governments for perceived economic mismanagement, corruption, and lack of economic opportunities. As the global economic situation worsens, the inequity within countries will be revealed and aggravate already weak social contracts throughout the Arab region. The impact of global economic disruptions on the most vulnerable people within the Arab region cannot be ignored.

Vulnerable Communities Will Be Hurt Most

Within Arab countries, global economic uncertainty and anemic growth disproportionately hurts the most vulnerable. The distribution of wealth has not improved enough to rid the Middle East and North Africa of the unenviable record of being the most unequal of all other regions. In fact, in the past decade, youth unemployment in the MENA region has been nearly double the world average and is increasing at a pace 2.5 times faster than the rest of the world. Unemployment levels in the Arab region have continued to rise since the onset of the pandemic. In 2021, the unemployment rate in the Arab region, excluding high-income, resource-rich countries, was 11.4 percent for the overall population and 29.4 percent for youth (aged fifteen to twenty-four). Both indicators are worse in Arab countries than in any other region.

People working in the informal sector are highly vulnerable, particularly those who benefit from tourism and other economic activities that would be deterred if economies collapse. The demographic reality in the region means that more youth are entering the labor market every year with increasingly weak employment prospects, among the lowest in the world. Youth in the Arab region are three times more likely to be unemployed compared to adults, making them highly vulnerable to economic shocks. Youth (under thirty years old) account for 55 percent of the Arab region’s population, compared to 36 percent in the OECD, making this a larger segment of the population than in many other countries. The young demographic profile is a political issue because youth often have high expectations to start their adult lives with job opportunities. Yet, when these opportunities are not available and they lose hope, their societal frustrations can lead to political and social protests. Indeed, polling in the region shows that Arab youth are among the most frustrated with the political and economic situations in their countries and more often want to emigrate. It is often the youngest and most educated who want to emigrate, which has a negative impact on the preservation of talented people in the region and contributes to the region’s brain drain. Women in the region surpass men in post-secondary education and yet are more likely to be unemployed, representing yet another loss of human capital, talent, and ingenuity to Arab economies.

Resource-Poor, Labor-Abundant Countries

In addition to unemployment, the Arab region has a serious food insecurity issue due to high wheat and fertilizer prices because of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Egypt, Lebanon, and Yemen are especially dependent on wheat imports from Russia and Ukraine. Türkiye had brokered a temporary deal to allow grain shipments through, but the deal is set to expire in May 2023. And as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime is expected to double down on war against Ukraine, there may be less room for compromise and a return to restricted shipment of food grains. This will increase the number of people affected by food insecurity in Egypt and Lebanon, where food costs are soaring. Unsurprisingly, both countries signed agreements with the IMF, as have Jordan, Sudan, and Tunisia. Moreover, many Arab governments’ fiscal capacity has been limited, sovereign debt levels are high, and IMF agreements often add restrictions on government spending as the terms of receiving funding. All of these factors further limit governments’ abilities to spend on food and energy subsidies and to provide other social safety nets. Without targeted social protections, social inequality will worsen and the prospect of social unrest will increase.

Egypt, with a population over 100 million, is especially troubled since previous instances of soaring debt and economic hardship have produced protests in the streets. Under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Egypt has undergone significant building of and investment in large infrastructure projects, although many are unproductive vanity projects. The government financed these projects through debt and loans, and when money left the region to Western capital markets that offered higher interest rate returns, Egypt was saddled with a large debt load. Egypt has had to devalue its currency, in some cases upon the insistence of the IMF, making it very difficult for consumers reliant on imported food and other items. The impact on the poorest Egyptians is significant, since bread, a staple food that accounts for a large portion of their nutritional intake, is too expensive for them.

Similarly, Lebanon was in economic distress before the pandemic, and its situation has continued to worsen as the banking system and its currency have nearly collapsed while its debt load has increased beyond manageable levels. Today, the average Lebanese person has seen their bank savings, pensions, and local wages dwindle in purchasing value as the Lebanese pound plummets, despite an IMF agreement in 2022. In a country that imports 80 percent of its basic needs, prices have skyrocketed beyond the Lebanese people’s reach. Many imported food items depended on government subsidies that the state can no longer afford to provide. Global inflation of food prices has worsened Lebanon’s food security. In addition to food, Lebanon imports the fuel needed to generate its electricity, and the international volatility in oil prices has worsened the public provision of energy, making the domestic economic situation worse and unpredictable.

Both Egypt and Lebanon’s short-to-medium-term economic prospects are quite worrisome. In the past, they have both leaned on foreign backers for financial support, both in the West and in the Arab Gulf, but these countries are currently facing their own economic challenges and have been less willing to shore up ailing regional laggards. Arab Gulf countries have a growing sense of nationalism to advance their own economies and do not feel the same obligation to financially back and support fellow Arab countries that they once did. Moreover, many Arab Gulf countries are undergoing ambitious national projects, such as Saudi Arabia’s new smart cities called NEOM and THE LINE, as well as the skyscraper-like supercity Mukaab. Such projects require significant financial resources, and there is less political and public appetite to sacrifice these projects in the name of Arab nationalism or sympathy with resource-poor Arab governments. This is not good for Egypt and Lebanon, and to a lesser extent Jordan, which have expected their pivotal role in regional politics to garner them more support.

Conclusion

The future of the Arab region is uncertain, and there are many worrying trends, such as the potential decline in oil prices and tourism, as well as rising food prices, that will impact the economic well-being of the average Arab citizen. No country will be spared, but some countries will be better able to withstand the potential for anemic economic growth and global economic disruptions. Resource-poor countries in the Arab world will likely feel the global and regional economic challenges most negatively. There will be a huge need for external financial support for many countries, be it from the international community or resource-rich Arab countries. Unfortunately, however, the global and regional appetite to coordinate to fire up the global economic engines and to help poorer Arab countries with financial assistance will be low, which will ultimately harm the most vulnerable people in the Arab region—its youth, women, and the poor. As the past has shown, this is a recipe for sociopolitical unrest.

The global energy transition to mitigate climate change initially entailed reducing and phasing out fossil fuel consumption and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies. That position reflected the fact that fossil fuels have been the largest contributor to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and, thus, have been driving climate change. Recently, the narrative has expanded to include a variety of energy transition pathways. These include not only renewable energy but also new pathways such as net-zero emissions systems of hydrocarbons, decarbonized industries, and hydrogen.¹

Arab states are directly impacted by energy transitions. They are home to some of the largest global reserves and the economies most overdependent on hydrocarbon rents (in the form of export revenue in exporting economies and foreign remittances in importing economies from nationals working in exporting states).² Thus, reduced global demand for hydrocarbons has long represented an existential threat to the region, especially for wealthy hydrocarbon-exporting Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states—namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

Yet, the expansion of energy transition pathways has put energy transition projects increasingly center stage in the region, both in GCC countries and in some poorer hydrocarbon importers—namely Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia.

Prior to COP26 in 2021, hydrocarbon-dependent Gulf states resisted the energy transition, winning them the reputation of climate obstructionists. Yet in an unprecedented shift, these states have been joining pro-climate endeavors since then. Around the time of COP26, the UAE pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Net-zero pledges by Saudi Arabia and Bahrain by 2060 followed. In 2022, during COP27, Kuwait and Oman followed suit with pledges by 2050. These states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have positioned themselves as leaders in providing clean energy globally with both expertise in hydrocarbons and a potential advantage in renewables and energy transitions. GCC states announced ambitious renewable energy targets, plans for carbon capture and reduction technology, and widescale decarbonization targets, among other initiatives. Some observers have welcomed such GCC announcements as major advancements of the climate agenda, while others viewed them as greenwashing. So why and how could a quintessential threat to one of the region’s main sources of socioeconomic development become the epicenter of its economic transformation and sustainability plans? And can energy transitions provide a transformative shift in energy and economic systems following decades of reliance on hydrocarbon exports for socioeconomic development?

GCC states are driving regional energy transitions, and their responses to the possibilities and potential threats of accelerating global energy transitions could engender significant transformation in their energy, economic, political, and social structures.

Although global energy transitions have emerged as a climate solution, GCC states’ motivations in pursuing them are primarily economic. Specifically, these transitions safeguard hydrocarbon exports while generating new export revenue necessary to maintain the political equilibrium and the role of the state and to fund socioeconomic development. Consequently, domestic energy transitions (like renewable power and energy efficiency) are deprioritized, while pro-export projects (like hydrogen and carbon capture technology) are accelerated. These developments are transforming GCC economies from hydrocarbon to energy exporters while maintaining hydrocarbons at the center of their economies, without changing existing economic rigidities. This transformation perpetuates current economic policy regimes and their associated challenges—an unsustainable situation that threatens the viability of the energy transitions. An integrative energy, economic, industrial, and regulatory policy reform is thus required.

Energy Transitions: Trends and Ambitions

Notwithstanding differences (in resource endowment, politics, economic wealth, and other areas), GCC states share similar energy and economic structures, characterized by overdependence on hydrocarbons in energy usage and exports. Hydrocarbons represent over 95 percent of the region’s energy consumption. In 2021, hydrocarbon export revenue’s contribution to GDP ranged from 40 percent to more than half in each GCC state, while hydrocarbon exports contributed between 55 percent (in the UAE) and 92 percent (in Kuwait) of exports. Importantly, hydrocarbon exports are also the primary contributor to government revenue; in 2021, they contributed 60 percent of government revenue in Saudi Arabia, 63 percent in Bahrain, 74 percent in Oman, and between 80 and 84 percent in the UAE, Qatar, and Kuwait.³

Initial Energy Transition and Mitigation Measures

Energy transition projects emerged under the umbrella of economic diversification, detailed in each GCC country’s grandiose, ambitious, multiyear economic transformation plans known as “Visions.”⁴ They include targets for renewable energy capacity, ranging from as low as 15 percent in Kuwait by 2030 to 50 percent in the UAE by 2050 (see table 1). Yet in 2022, the share of renewable energy in power generation still hovered at less than 1 percent, except in the UAE where it reached 7 percent, also below target. The UAE also adopted nuclear energy to provide nearly 25 percent of its electricity needs.

Table 1. Installed Renewable Energy Capacity in the GCC Compared With National Targets
Country	Share of renewable energy in total electricity capacity	National renewable energy targets
Hydrocarbon-exporting GCC economies
Bahrain	0.10%	5% by 2025 and 10% by 2035 of electricity generation
Kuwait	0.40%	15% by 2030 of electricity generation
Qatar	0.10%	200-500 MW of solar energy by 2020
Oman	0.40%	10% by 2025 of electricity generation
Saudi Arabia	0.20%	3.45 GW by 2020; 9.56 GW by 2023 (10% of cap), and 30% of electricity generation from renewables, nuclear, and others
UAE	7.00%	Abu Dhabi 7% of capacity by 2020; Dubai 7% of electricity generation by 2020; Ras al-Khaimah 20-30% clean energy by 2040; total UAE 27% clean energy by 2021, 44% of capacity by 2050.
Hydrocarbon importing economies
Egypt	20%	42% by 2035 of electricity generation
Jordan	15%	35% by 2035 of electricity generation
Morocco	34%	42% by 2020 and 52% by 2050 of installed capacity
Tunisia	8%	30% by 2035 of installed capacity
Source: Author’s calculations using data from the International Renewable Energy Agency (2018, 2023); national official documents of visions and development plans in GCC countries; U.S. International Trade Administration; and the Jordan Times.

Moreover, GCC states enacted energy pricing reforms. Notwithstanding preexisting political pressures, it was not until the collapse of the oil price in mid-2014 and the ensuing substantial declines in government revenue that GCC policymakers implemented a fundamental shift in economic policy. They reduced energy subsidies to ease fiscal pressures and meet urgent economic diversification needs. GCC states also announced energy efficiency targets, but opportunities remain underdeveloped especially as policies incentivizing efficiency remain limited.

The Dawn of Hydrogen and Carbon Reduction Technology

GCC states’ economic sustainability was further threatened by post-pandemic economic challenges, which exacerbated existing pressures from the accelerating global energy transitions. In 2020 and 2021, GCC states announced ambitious energy transition projects, including hydrogen and carbon reduction technologies. These projects were then complemented by ambitious climate targets and net-zero emissions pledges, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE declaring clean energy leadership positions.

Two primary features characterize GCC states’ energy transitions and net-zero targets.

First, the targets center around the ongoing production, consumption, and exportation of hydrocarbons, but with a twist: the hydrocarbons are low emissions thanks to the application of carbon capture mechanisms. This is explicitly stated in the Nationally Determined Contributions submissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (which are a government obligation under the Paris Agreement) from GCC states. It is also evident in Saudi Arabia’s Circular Carbon Economy (CCE) National Program,⁵ endorsed as the cornerstone of its decarbonization, carbon reduction, and recycling solutions. The CCE framework encompasses the production of hydrocarbons and new energy sources, most notably clean hydrogen and heavy industries that are difficult to electrify (known as hard-to-abate sectors) using carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) technology. Across the Gulf, nature-based solutions are highlighted over reducing hydrocarbons consumption and production: initiatives include the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s planting of mangroves and Saudi Arabia’s Green Initiative and Middle East Green Initiative to plant 10 billion in Saudi Arabia and 40 billion trees in the Middle East. However, CCUS technology is currently unviable, unlike carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have accelerated investments in CCS facilities, which currently capture approximately 12 percent of global carbon dioxide captured annually. Hydrocarbon production is a priority for other hydrocarbon exporters of the Net-Zero Producers Forum (created in 2021 by Norway, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States).

Second, clean hydrogen projects intended for exports are at the heart of GCC energy transition plans (and those of some Arab hydrocarbon-importing states). Hydrogen does not emit GHG emissions when burned, and thus it has emerged globally as an important potential pathway for climate change mitigation, energy security, and industrial decarbonization. Currently, around 96 percent of the hydrogen used globally as industrial feedstock is produced from hydrocarbons in processes that emit high GHGs. However, emissions can be reduced in two ways. The first involves the application of CCS/CCUS technology in hydrogen production from hydrocarbons (known as blue hydrogen). Alternatively, emissions can be reduced when hydrogen is produced by electrolyzing water with emissions-free renewable energy (known as green hydrogen) (see figure 1).⁶

Clean (blue or green) hydrogen represents potentially large export and economic diversification opportunities for Arab states. Gulf states have a comparative advantage in blue hydrogen thanks to their well-known comparative advantage and expertise in the hydrocarbon sector and established trade routes and markets. Arab states generally have a potential comparative advantage in renewable energy, which can translate to a potential comparative advantage in green hydrogen as well. While the future role of clean hydrogen in the global energy system is uncertain,⁷ it could be large, with the potential market for clean hydrogen and its derivatives (such as ammonia, which has hydrogen molecules) estimated at $400–$700 billion. Of that, GCC states could potentially make $70–$200 billion.

GCC states had long lagged behind Europe, advanced Asian economies, Australia, and the United States in adopting hydrogen strategies. Starting in 2019, however, they began announcing hydrogen strategies and ambitious large-scale hydrogen projects. Notably, Saudi Arabia plans to be a leading green hydrogen producer with its $500 billion megaproject, NEOM intended to produce 1.2 million tonnes of green-hydrogen-based ammonia per year. Saudi Aramco also announced plans to capture the lion’s share of blue hydrogen demand by 2025, and it successfully exported the world’s first blue ammonia to Japan in 2020 and to South Korea in 2022.

The UAE announced plans in 2019 to produce blue and green hydrogen, and Dubai Electricity and Water Authority along with Siemens Energy launched the region’s first industrial-scale green hydrogen project in 2021. Driven by its limited hydrocarbon reserves relative to other GCC states, Oman also aims to transform its economy to a hydrogen economy. Its national hydrogen economy strategy was adopted in 2020. In 2020 and 2021, Oman’s oil company OQ signed concessions and agreements through joint ventures, establishing the Hyport Duqm Project to develop green hydrogen and ammonia plants in the Special Economic Zone at Duqm. The $2.5 billion facility is expected to produce 2,200 million tonnes of green ammonia per day. In its 2020 White Paper Towards a National Hydrogen Strategy, Kuwait signaled its intentions for clean hydrogen production and has been shown to have the potential to produce green hydrogen competitively. Qatar, the last GCC state to join the global hydrogen market, announced in 2022 intentions to build the world’s largest blue ammonia plant, Ammonia-7—a $1.156 billion facility with a planned production capacity of 1.2 million tonnes per year. Additional projects and agreements are likely to continue to emerge in the near future, especially given foreign interest (especially from Europe) in investing in and importing the region’s green hydrogen production.

The aforementioned two features suggest that the ultimate goals of GCC states’ net-zero targets are to safeguard and increase hydrocarbon export levels—a goal consistent with statements in Saudi Arabia’s Nationally Determined Contributions submission.

Energy Transitions: An Economic, not Environmental, Response

The main driver for the acceleration of energy transition pathways in GCC states (and Arab states in general) is economic: to safeguard hydrocarbon exports and derive new exports that are necessary to maintain the role of the state and drive socioeconomic development.

Indeed, energy transitions are part of much-needed environmental solutions. Situated in one of the warmest regions with environmentally constrained and arid geography, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Mediterranean regions are among the most impacted by climate change.⁸ Yet they are most impacted by emissions from other regions; MENA contributed only 5 percent of global emissions in 2021.⁹

Over the last decade, however, emissions in Gulf countries have accelerated at an alarming pace. GCC states lead the region in emissions and energy consumption especially in energy (hydrocarbon and power) and transport sectors (as shown in figure 2). High emissions are driven by high production facilitated by very low production costs, rising water desalination and cooling requirements, and excessive energy consumption (both industrial and household).

Similar trends emerge on a per capita level. Economic policies that distribute enviable energy subsidies and welfare measures have fostered overconsumption and a very carbon-intensive lifestyle. GCC countries consistently rank in the world’s fifteen-highest energy consumers, averaging 10,066 kilograms of oil equivalent per capita (based on World Bank data), more than double the average per capita consumption of OECD countries. GCC states have some of the world’s highest emissions per capita, consistently ranking among the top ten per-capita emitters (see table 2).

Table 2. Arab States Per Capita Carbon Dioxide Emissions Compared to Other Countries (2021)
Global rank	Country	CO2 emissions per capita (tonnes per capita )
1	Qatar	35.59
2	Bahrain	26.66
3	Kuwait	24.97
4	Trinidad and Tobago	23.68
5	Brunei	23.53
6	United Arab Emirates	21.79
7	New Caledonia	19.1
8	Saudi Arabia	18.7
9	Oman	17.92
10	Australia	15.09
11	Mongolia	15.03
12	United States	14.86
15	Canada	14.3
20	Russia	12.1
82	Iraq	4.26
92	Algeria	3.99
127	Jordan	2.3
128	Egypt	2.28
139	India	1.93
140	Morocco	1.9
Source: Author analysis based on data from the Global Carbon Project.

Nevertheless, environment sustainability does not prominently feature in GCC vision statements (with only Oman having environment-specific targets). And GCC countries were slow in adopting net-zero targets that center hydrocarbons. Instead, economic considerations are motivating energy transitions in the Arab world. These considerations are key for hydrocarbon importers—namely Egypt,¹⁰ Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia. Abundant renewable energy sources offer energy security and promise avenues for new exports, especially of green hydrogen and derivates to Europe.

For hydrocarbon exporters in the Gulf, net-zero targets are presented as part of economic transformation as a pragmatic response to the inevitability of expected future declines in global hydrocarbon demand. This is why investments and advancements in projects that expand exports (such as clean hydrogen and CCS/CCUS technology) accelerate at an impressive speed, while domestic energy transitions (especially renewables and energy efficiency) are slow.

Energy exports are necessary in the absence of diversified sources of government revenue, but they are also important for maintaining the prevailing political economy of a welfare-based state that depends on distributing hydrocarbon rents.¹¹ The political economy (often called the “social contract”) emerged as massive windfalls of oil and gas export rents offered Gulf states key economic advantages. This was especially true after the Arab oil embargo and subsequent oil shock of 1973–1974, coupled with very low production costs owing to geological advantages and very liberal trade policies for goods and services, capital, and labor. As a result, GCC states achieved unprecedented socioeconomic development and per capita incomes. Hydrocarbon export rents funded the distribution of enviable welfare redistributive measures to citizens and local industries, including energy and other subsidies and guaranteed public sector employment to citizens with generous salaries and benefits. These policies secured general political and regime stability (despite historical local and geopolitical tensions) and military support from abroad.¹²

Prioritizing hydrocarbon exports dominated economic policy and was essential for socioeconomic development and the political economy in the Gulf. Diversification plans were discussed on paper for decades, but the main deliberate diversification policy choice was global asset accumulation in sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) along with, ironically, expansion of the hydrocarbon sector including downstream activities. The latter capture additional value across the whole supply chain but do not change the economic structure or the reliance on hydrocarbons with their volatile prices.

The depth of economic challenges of hydrocarbon dependence became evident following the oil price collapse mid-2014 and the ensuing fiscal challenges. Gulf states implemented various energy and tax reforms—most notably, the imposition of a value-added tax in historically tax-free states and the reduction of energy subsidies. These reforms have been politically contentious to varying degrees, as they threatened the distribution of wealth and resultant political equilibrium. Despite these reforms, subsidies and welfare distribution measures prevail, especially to private oligopolistic firms, and the state holds its central role in the economy. Energy transition projects are driven mostly by state-owned entities, and private industries expect subsidies to implement decarbonization.¹³ Another serious challenge is generating employment, especially for the youth who represent more than 50 percent of the region’s population. In the GCC, this challenge has serious implications for the labor market: the bloated public sector is a fiscal liability, and expatriate workers occupy jobs that many locals do not want and make up the majority of workers (from 74 percent in Saudi Arabia in 2022 to near 94 percent in the case of Qatar in 2022).

Ultimately, energy transition projects in GCC states only transform their economies from hydrocarbon exporters to energy exporters, with hydrocarbons remaining at the center of the economy. As a result, the existing political economy and role of the state are preserved, without a corresponding transformation in economic structure or economic rigidities.

The future remains uncertain: clean energy investments dropped following the COVID-19 pandemic, and upstream activities resumed with the rise of hydrocarbon prices and general demand following the war in Ukraine. At the same time, hydrogen and CCUS projects are dialed up but lack necessary investments and technology. But the region’s sustainability necessitates energy and economic transformation.

Challenges

Notwithstanding ambitious targets, the region, including wealthy GCC states, lags in energy transition projects. Arab states generally and GCC states specifically face fundamental challenges that hinder energy transitions and endanger regional environmental and economic sustainability. Chief among these challenges are the often-ignored economic rigidities of procyclical fiscal policy, an oligopolistic private sector, limited technology and renewable energy infrastructure, and weak regulations.

Oligopolistic Private Sector

A key challenge in Gulf economies is the pervasiveness of private sector oligopolies coupled with the existence of large, publicly owned companies; this situation greatly limits the expansion of nonhydrocarbon productive sectors necessary for economic diversification. The majority of nonenergy sectors are dominated by a few companies (as evidenced in data presented in table 3) and reap substantial rewards of any expansion in oil price rents.

Table 3. Listed Firms’ Concentration in Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia ( recently available data)
Sector (as listed in the stock exchange)	Total number of listed firms	Percentage of total firms owning 60% of industry's capital	Percentage of total firms owning 80% of industry's capital
Kuwait
Oil refining and gas	8	38%	63%
Chemical and mining	5	40%	40%
Light manufacturing	7	14%	14%
Telecommunications	3	33%	33%
Construction and transportation	36	14%	36%
Financial services (banks, insurance, other services)	72	8%	14%
Other services (real estate, technology, healthcare, other)	75	8%	15%
Oman
Services	239	2%	8%
Industrial	88	15%	31%
Financial	140	18%	29%
Saudi Arabia
Capital goods	13	46%	62%
Energy	5	20%	20%
Financial (banks, diversified financials, insurance)	47	9%	17%
Light manufacturing (consumer durables and apparel, food and beverages)	18	11%	17%
Materials	42	7%	19%
Real estate (development and management, REITs)	28	18%	32%
Services and retail (healthcare, commercial and professional services, IT, consumer services, media, and so on)	39	18%	41%
Telecommunications	4	25%	25%
Transportation	5	60%	80%
Utilities	2	50%	50%
Source: Author’s analysis using data from the Kuwait Stock Exchange (2016), Omani Stock Exchange (2023), and the Saudi Stock Exchange (2020).

It is well accepted in economic theory that the pervasiveness of oligopolies limits competition. Oligopolistic firms price their products with a markup above average costs, causing a large part of the current economic efficiency to be captured by their rents. Sustained rents detract from growth-enhancing innovation and creative destruction, thereby hampering economic efficiency, competitiveness, and growth. In resource economies, the pervasiveness of oligopolies poses another challenge: it limits the expansion of non-oil productive capacity needed for export diversification.

Economics literature explains the dynamics of resource-dependent economies as an example of Dutch disease. This phenomenon refers to instances when an export boom in natural resources (following rises in their prices) leads to a significant appreciation of the nominal (and real) exchange rate (or inflation in countries with fixed exchange rates regimes). The appreciating real exchange rate renders nonresource exports relatively more expensive in international markets. Capital and labor move toward the resource sector and away from nonresource tradables, while the rise in incomes causes a secondary boom in nontraded services and imports.¹⁴ Busts (following declines in resource export prices) have the opposite effect. They render nonresource exports more competitive in international markets. Thus, theoretically, reverse Dutch disease dynamics could be advantageous to nonresource exports or even reverse the pattern of trade, if large enough.¹⁵

Yet in highly specialized Gulf states, oligopolies’ pervasiveness yields results that are contrary to Dutch disease expectations. Economic efficiency during booms and busts is largely reduced because rents are captured by the oligopolies in the public and private sectors. Oligopolies capture rents during booms and busts owing to:

• access to subsidies to expand diversification (subsidies that persist despite energy price reforms in the GCC);
• access to expatriate labor with flexible contracts and lower wages than national labor; and
• limited regulation of oligopolistic collusion or pricing.

The dynamics are as follows. When oil prices are high (as in 2022), the rise in export rents expand economic activity (including output and employment) and profits in the energy sector, investments in SWFs as well as nontraded services and rent redistribution payments to the public and industries (through a procyclical fiscal policy). Consequently, terms of trade improvements are captured as higher rents by only a small number of firms in a few oligopolistic industries,¹⁶ as explained above. But there is an almost nonexistent deindustrialization effect. These dynamics also render efficient and high-return investments in the domestic economy difficult. Busts, by contrast, result in the opposite. Oligopolistic firms’ markups decline as a result, but they do not expand their exports even though they are more competitive with the depreciating real exchange rate. Instead, they cut costs by reducing expatriate labor employment at relatively low costs and without large repercussions for unemployment. Thus, the overall result is little to no expansion of nonhydrocarbon exports.

Thus, in the existing economic policy regime with low competition regulation, excess hydrocarbon export rents do not translate to meaningful export diversification. Despite private firms’ rising participation (through foreign direct investment and joint ventures) in energy projects in GCC states, their oligopolistic nature will limit growth, competition, and economic efficiency. Changing these patterns in a way that can distribute economic efficiency gains economy-wide requires the implementation of private sector regulations, pro-competition microeconomic reform, and industrial policy reform.

Procyclical Fiscal Policies

Exacerbating effects of the pervasiveness of oligopolies in the Gulf states is their procyclical (rather than countercyclical) policy regime adopted for managing hydrocarbon price shocks. In fiscal procyclicality, government expenditures expand during economic booms and contract during busts. Such tendencies are often worsened by domestic macroeconomic and political instability. In GCC states with low oligopolistic regulation, fiscal procyclicality is problematic. It exacerbates the underlying business cycles and harms economic and energy diversification plans.

During booms, procyclical government expenditures expand hydrocarbon outputs and exports, SWF savings, and welfare redistribution payments—many of which are wrapped as business incentives, grants, or tax credits. Thus, they expand mainly nontraded oligopolies’ markup, as described above. Further, transferring the windfall to private agents to induce them to undertake additional investments is likely to fail owing to limited information about the duration of the windfall.

Busts see a procyclical reduction in noncommitted expenditures (such as energy transition and economic diversification funds) because the committed expenditures (such as public sector wages) are very rigid and very large (50 percent or more of current expenditures in the Gulf). Oligopolistic firms respond to reduced local demand and procyclical expenditures by reducing output and releasing expatriate labor, rather than expanding into the international market. This flexibility in the expatriate labor market has been a key economic adjustment mechanism that acts as a cushion to the economy, along with other adjustment mechanisms (primarily investments in or fiscal commitments to maintain contributions to SWFs, which sterilize oil revenue and offer savings used during busts and fiscal deficits). The overall effects are limited to nonexisting expansion of nonhydrocarbon exports.

In the current economic regime, GCC states cannot be countercyclical even when they implement seemingly countercyclical policies. This was evidenced following the COVID-19 pandemic when large declines in hydrocarbon export revenue in the GCC were accompanied by expanded expenditures and COVID-19 relief packages. These packages seem countercyclical, but the potential gains of a countercyclical fiscal policy could not be realized because they were consumption-based. They eased consumption shocks and mitigated inflationary and unemployment effects but without expanding production nor supply nor reducing profits to oligopolistic firms. This is a powerful, evidence-based insight that further explains the GCC states’ limited diversification to date.

Lack of Available CCS/CCUS Technology and Low R&D

Realizing GCC states’ decarbonization, net-zero, and hydrogen ambitions alongside consuming and exporting hydrocarbons hinges on the availability of CCS and CCUS technology. Yet it is currently unviable and requires significant R&D investments. In the GCC, public sector involvement in the energy sector could support R&D activities to bolster the sector’s technological readiness to achieve initial market penetration. However, in 2021, and despite large R&D investments in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, R&D spending made up low shares of GDP in GCC countries: Bahrain (0.1 percent), Kuwait (0.2 percent), Oman (0.4 percent), Qatar (0.5 percent), Saudi Arabia (0.5 percent), and the UAE (1.45 percent). These shares were lower than the 3–4 percent average in advanced economies with similar per capita income levels and lower than hydrocarbon exporters Australia (1.8 percent), Norway (2.3 percent), and the United States (3.45 percent). The GCC states’ contribution to global hydrogen and low-carbon energy R&D has been negligible to date.

Recent announcements by Saudi Arabia and the UAE to invest in carbon reduction technologies could signal a potential improvement in the underlying ecosystem to fund technological developments, especially in CCS and CCUS.¹⁷ Yet, given low R&D investments, absent acquiring the required technology, Gulf states will not be able to achieve their energy transition and net-zero targets.

Limited Renewable Energy Infrastructure Due to Lack of Economic Motivations

Another challenge is limited renewable energy infrastructure, without which domestic decarbonization and green hydrogen export plans cannot be realized. Despite variations among them, Arab countries are behind on their renewable energy targets, which are intended for domestic power generation only (see table 1). The Gulf states have the financial resources to undertake such projects. They also have a potential comparative advantage in renewable energy, owing to some of the world’s best solarand wind resources and some of the lowest costs for renewable energy production. Yet in 2021, renewable energy capacity was significantly lower than targets for domestic energy needs, generating 1 percent of electricity in GCC states except the UAE, where it reached 7 percent.¹⁸ These shares are also behind those of Egypt (20 percent), Jordan (26 percent), and Morocco (37 percent). Slow development in renewable infrastructure for domestic needs also raises the question about renewable infrastructure required for achieving pro-export projects. To meet hydrogen targets alone, GCC countries would need to increase their renewable energy capacity by an estimated sixtyfold (an additional 40–60 gigawatts).

Numerous reasons have been cited for the lack of renewable energy infrastructure. These include technical barriers (such as difficulties with grid access, confidence in new technology, and availability of a skilled workforce), institutional deficiencies that lack clear mandates and planning capacity, historic subsidies, and limited incentives, regulations, and enforcement.

Another reason largely absent from the literature is the underlying economics: renewable energy projects are a net cost for hydrocarbon-dependent states and generate an undesirable reduction in overall export revenue. Although renewable energy is environmentally advantageous and theoretically spares hydrocarbons for exports, it has, to date, been fundamentally at odds with the economic strategy of GCC states. The main culprits are the competing dynamics and mandates of the nationally owned sectors of hydrocarbons and electricity (which governs renewable energy). The former sells hydrocarbons for electricity at international markets prices, while the latter pays either subsidized or market prices.¹⁹ Expanding renewables yields additional hydrocarbons that are no longer demanded by the power sector and thus need markets. Theoretically, the result could be additional hydrocarbons for exports, but under normal energy market conditions, holding inventories or increasing supplies poses downward pressures on export prices. In addition, the hydrocarbon sector traditionally cannot generate revenue from newly installed renewable energy as the latter falls under the mandate of the electricity sector and ministry. These competing mandates explain the delay of Phase II of Kuwait’s Shagaya Renewable Energy Park in 2020, when a new law interrupted Kuwait Petroleum Company’s work on the project.²⁰

For state budgets, renewable energy for domestic power generation is nontraded, so it offers no export revenue to compensate for potentially lost hydrocarbon revenue. These opportunity costs are deepened by the large, lump-sum capital requirements for renewable energy infrastructure. Incentivizing private sector investments in renewable infrastructure might also require government subsidies.²¹ In net, renewable power for domestic consumption is more costly for the state than hydrocarbon-based power.

This explanation is consistent with actual trends, which saw export-oriented green hydrogen plans accelerate renewable energy development—but only for export-oriented projects, as in Saudi’s NEOM, not for domestic power use.

Renewable power for hydrogen exports should not be at the expense of domestic decarbonization. To meet future targets, GCC states must adopt policies and mobilize resources to meet the needs of both domestic power and export-oriented energy projects.

Weak Regulations

The absence of collective policies for environmental protection, decarbonization, and CCUS in the GCC hampers domestic decarbonization efforts and the development of clean hydrogen, particularly for domestic use. Given the high costs of the green transition (related to technology, feedstock, and energy mix), environmental and decarbonization policies can offer the primary incentive to achieve Gulf states’ energy and emissions targets. Gulf states have included CCS and CCUS technologies in national communications. CCUS (rather than CCS) technology is particularly important for GCC states because it promises to decarbonize both hydrocarbons and the hard-to-abate sectors without necessarily abating hydrocarbons altogether. Yet, to date, Gulf states have significant policy gaps regarding environmental protection, decarbonization incentives, and CCUS (such as carbon transportation and storage).

Takeaways and Policy Implications for Economic and Political Sustainability

There are five main takeaways. First, energy transitions in Arab states are driven by economic motivations, primarily to maximize hydrocarbon and energy exports to protect the state and maintain the prevailing political economy. Second, prioritizing economic considerations delays domestic energy transitions while favoring export-oriented projects. Third, despite advancements in energy transitions and subsidy reform, GCC political economies remain largely unchanged, with hydrocarbon and energy rents at their center. Fourth, the accelerated energy transition projects to date transform economies from hydrocarbon to energy exporters without a fundamental change in economic structures or economic rigidities. Finally, even if hydrocarbon rents deliver energy transitions in the GCC, the current economic policy regime and rigidities in highly specialized welfare petrostates are unsustainable.

The current policy regime exacerbates existing economic distortions while eroding long-term economic resilience, diversification, and decarbonization incentives. Thus, there is significant scope for energy, economic, industrial, and regulatory policy reform. A top-down policy approach can be a potential pathway, given its historical precedence in effectuating social, political, and economic change across the region.

On the energy front, the MENA region stands to benefit from divorcing aspects of domestic energy policy from energy export motivations and reflecting local sustainability priorities in the larger energy policy at the lowest costs. Domestic energy policy should prioritize energy access, reducing energy consumption, incentivizing energy efficiency (which can abate up to 40 percent of emissions), and decarbonization. The region should also prioritize producing the majority of its power from renewables and even consider nuclear energy as a possible option. Energy policy for both domestic and export purposes must form part of a larger framework that aligns the various aspects of economic, industrial, and regulatory policies. Gulf states must also adopt targeted policies that incentivize energy efficiency and reduce consumption, as well as advance energy transitions by securing the necessary regulatory and technology infrastructure. Subsidy reform remains an important priority for the region. It requires redesigning countercyclical measures that balance socioeconomic development and affordable energy access for low-income households along with industrial competition priorities.

An immediate, phased, wide-scale microeconomic reform and oligopoly/industrial regulation can substantially improve economic efficiency and enhance economic resiliency in light of continuous energy export volatility. Examples include price cap regulations and competition reform that induce oligopolies to price more competitively, thereby reducing their markups and increasing competition. Although politically challenging, oligopoly/industrial regulation and countercyclical measures that expand productive capacity (rather than consumption) could help GCC countries raise economic efficiency, manage oil and non-oil rents, and expand nonenergy exports.

Lastly, filling existing decarbonization and emissions regulatory gaps is indispensable to ensure a low-carbon transition of the highest-emitting domestic sectors (especially transportation and renewables). Filling these regulatory gaps can also support new energy sectors such as clean hydrogen. They can facilitate the transition of the hard-to-abate sectors in a way that rewards green technologies adoption and investments as well as industrial output.

Successful implementation of said policy reform requires political will to accommodate changes in elements that have long undergirded the political economy. It will also require balancing long- and short-term policy objectives and trade-offs through a larger system of integrative policies to achieve decarbonization and economic development in a way that maximizes socioeconomic welfare and economic and resources sustainability alike.

Notes

¹ This shift reflects geopolitical, economic, security, developmental, and technological motivations and implications for countries. It can be traced in climate negotiations and agreements during the UN Conference of the Parties (known as “COP”). In COP26, the members adopted the Glasgow Climate Pact, which called for phasing down (not phasing out) inefficient subsidies and unabated coal but not oil and gas, on the basis that they are necessary for energy access and security globally and for economic development in a large part of the world. The explicit mention of “coal” and “fossil fuel subsidies” was a break from previous UN climate agreements.

² To demonstrate, in 2021, the UAE was the world’s second-largest and MENA’s largest source of foreign remittances ($43 billion) followed by Saudi Arabia ($35 billion). Egypt was the world’s fifth-largest and MENA’s largest recipient of foreign remittances ($32 billion) in the same year.

³ Shares are determined by author’s calculations using data in each country’s national accounts and Ministry of Finance, UN data, and the International Monetary Fund.

⁴ These statements extended existing economic diversification plans of previous multiyear development plans.

⁵ The CCE framework was endorsed by the 2020 Saudi-presided G20 in Riyadh.

⁶ The production method for low-carbon hydrogen has major implications for GHG emissions, costs, and location of energy production.

⁷ The expected share of hydrogen in total global energy demand by 2050 ranges from 3 percent (Announced Pledge Scenario by the IEA), to 13–16 percent in a net-zero world, up to 12 percent in a 1.5-degrees-Celsius scenario, to 22 percent.

⁸ Impacts include an excessive number of intolerably hot days and ensuing effects on health, productivity, energy consumption, reduced efficiency of power production, migration and conflict, and economic concerns. Water stresses alone could reduce GDPs in MENA countries by as much as 14 percent by 2050.

⁹ MENA emissions grew from around 4 percent of those of Europe and the United States in 1965 to approximately half in 2021, as can be seen from examining emissions data from the International Energy Agency.

¹⁰ Egypt has been both an importer and an exporter of hydrocarbons in the past decade. It has been a net importer of crude oil and condensate since 2019, and it achieved self-sufficiency in natural gas between 2010–2014 and in 2018–2021.

¹¹ As Gulf and Arab states distribute rents to their citizens, the welfare-based state has often been described in the context of rentier state theory: rentier states distribute generous resource rents to their citizens in lieu of their political participation or power. But Gulf states’ dynamics are more complex, variant, and have not yielded results consist with the theory.

¹² Gulf countries have achieved general stability despite serious tensions, such as internal and external Arab nationalist agitation in the 1950s and 1960s, Islamist-inspired regime challenges from the 1970s onward, and the Arab Spring.

¹³ Author’s interviews with private firms in Oman, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, including a survey of private cement companies in Saudi Arabia as part of a project on decarbonizing cement. See Bassam Dally, Manal Shehabi, et al., “Decarbonization Options for the Saudi Cement Industry,” King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, 2023, forthcoming.

¹⁴ For more information, see Corden (2012); Corden & Neary (1982); Venables & van der Ploeg (2013); Tyers & Walker (2016).

¹⁵ This is driven by nonresource exports becoming more competitive in the international market owing to the depreciating real exchange rate and the contracting hydrocarbon and nontradable services industries.

¹⁶ Even if firms can enter/exit the market.

¹⁷ Examples include Aramco’s $1.5 million sustainability fund, Sabic’s CCU investments in one of the world’s largest plants, and ADNOC’s $15 billion decarbonization commitment.

¹⁸ The share of non-fossil-fuels-based electricity in the UAE has reached around 12 percent in 2021, following the commissioning of Barakah Nuclear Energy Plant Unit 2.

¹⁹ This is presumably the case with the implementation of energy pricing reforms that have commenced in the region. Nevertheless, there is a general lack of transparency in data on pricing of hydrocarbons consumed by the electricity sector along with the possibility of the existence of hidden subsidies.

²⁰ Phase II of Shagaya Renewable Energy Park project was initially developed by Kuwait Petroleum Company until 2020. The project was interrupted by Kuwait’s Law 19 for 2015, which amended Law 28 of 2012. The law restricted the implementation of electrical power and water desalination plants to be within the mandate of Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water and private-public partnerships under the Kuwait Authority of Partnership Projects.

²¹ As in the case in Jordan or Kuwait’s public-private partnerships.

Climate change is a systemic form of change affecting the biosphere and all human civilizations in it. It is not a linear set of risks that will affect societies, but a form of change that takes a life of its own and reshapes societies and landscapes. Climate change will redistribute natural resources, impact relationships between governments and peoples, heighten vulnerabilities, and create security challenges that may go well beyond what societies can adapt to. The shocks that societies have been experiencing so far—mostly in the form of ever-devastating fires, droughts, and floods—are just the tip of the iceberg. They are the beginning of an upending process whose outcome is not yet fully capable of being understood. In the reshaping process that anthropogenic climate change has launched, foundations of society are themselves in the process of changing, including the equilibriums that have tied human settlements to reliable natural resources and the economic and political relations that have bound societies together.

Analysis, preparation, adaptation, and the willingness to consider radical changes (rather than incremental ones, within business-as-usual scenarios) are the factors that will determine both the quality and outcomes of the process and the ability to adapt to rapidly unfolding risks and opportunities. This way to talk about climate change has however not fully surfaced, and climate change is certainly not being framed this way in the Arab world. For more than a decade, if and when climate change was discussed, it was referred to as a threat or a risk multiplier—not as a game changer.

Yet, climate change in the Arab world is already unfolding rapidly. It will have deep and pervasive impacts even if the international community manages to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (°C) compared to preindustrial levels, which at this point seems unlikely. It is already well-known that the Arab world—spanning from the northern parts of Africa to the Fertile Crescent and the Arabian Peninsula—is one of the most ecologically depleted regions in the world and has been for centuries due to persistent anthropogenic pressures. This ecological depletion, which includes high water vulnerability and low soil productivity, predisposes the region to environmental shocks. Climate change is making those worse. If the world continues to cruise through another decade without acting decisively on climate mitigation, all countries around the world will need to shift their attention to the combined challenges of mitigation and adaptation. The ability of Arab countries to transition away from fossil-dependent economies while simultaneously building adaptation and aggressive regeneration into economic and policy planning will determine the region’s stability in the future.

For decades, conflict protraction has remained a major concern in parts of the Arab world. It is only fair to ponder whether new or protracting conflicts may be on the horizon as the region undergoes profound biophysical and natural endowment change, which will necessarily impact political economies and sociocultural fabrics. While thinking through the lens of conflict and cooperation is obviously legitimate, it is too binary to really understand the profound ways in which the Arab world will change and what climate change will mean for the region and for how the region relates to the rest of the world. Tension and cooperation are likely to take place simultaneously in response to climate change. Tensions may include conflict hotspots, but insecurity will go beyond these hot spots and will take on diffuse manifestations in the future. Cooperation patterns will emerge in response to political, economic, and biophysical changes in the region, and some are already apparent today. But it is unlikely, given the current framing of climate disruptions today, that current cooperation patterns will be enough to hold and tackle the complexity of what is to come.

Climate Disruptions in the Arab World: A Landscape Approach

In February 2023, 419 parts per million of carbon dioxide were recorded in the planet’s atmosphere. This leads to two consequences. First, global warming is on its way to hitting a level 1.2°C higher than preindustrial levels. Second, the accumulated stock of carbon into the atmosphere will materialize into a number of climate disruptions that are baked into the atmospheric system. These disruptions will occur in an increasingly systemic and nonlinear fashion. Looking beyond this already sobering state of affairs, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has highlighted the grave situation that will impact countries the world over:

• The release of excess greenhouse gases continues unabated and has largely rebounded after the slump observed during the coronavirus pandemic.
• The planet should not exceed 1.5°C of global warming compared to preindustrial levels, lest planetary tipping points be accelerated with consequences that may undermine the ability to sustain any human civilization in the future.
• Yet, mitigation strategies have so far failed to reach the necessary level of greenhouse gas curbing, and it is plausible that the world may peak at 1.5°C of warming as early in the next decade. It is hoped that the peak will be temporary and that mitigation strategies will steer humanity toward a lower warming threshold. However, current mitigation strategies are not on par with that scenario.
• Climate finance is drastically underdelivering on adaptation planning, even though it should now rank as a top priority for all countries, particularly in highly climate vulnerable countries such as those in the Arab world.

To say that these facts are deeply worrying is an understatement. They provide a global backdrop to the fight against climate change in every region, including in the Arab world—a region where impacts are manifesting in a stronger and more accelerated fashion than expected. Grappling with the reality that these facts create and inferring what needs to happen from a mitigation and adaptation perspective are what will make the difference globally and regionally between a world that adapts and a world that fragments under the weight of compounding crises and multidimensional disruptions.

How Is the Arab World Impacted by the Fast-Approaching Climate Reality?

The Arab region is on average warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. Temperatures in the region have already significantly increased and will continue to do so. The level to which they will increase depends naturally on the success of ambitious global mitigation strategies. It is however crucial to understand that even if the international community manages to keep global warming under the 1.5°C threshold, the Arab region would still experience an average temperature increase of about 2°C between 2021 and 2039, with peaks of temperatures in summer months at about 2.5°C (see figure 1). More alarming assessments estimate that the Arab world could experience as much as 4°C of warming by 2050 compared to preindustrial levels, a temperature increase that would effectively lead to inhabitability.

This prospect is not integrated into medium- and long-term planning from an energy, economic, humanitarian, sociopolitical, nor migratory perspective. It is actually not being discussed nor envisaged as a true possibility in spite of accumulating scientific evidence pointing to the accelerating trajectories of global warming. This is not just at the policy level. Perceptions about climate change in the Arab world indicate a lower level of mobilization about this issue compared to other regions in the world. Survey respondents as recently as in 2022 tended to believe that climate change may harm future generations, but they generally felt less concerned about current changes in the Arab region, in spite of experiencing increasingly dangerous disruptions. This lag in mobilization is the function of many different factors, including the fact that climate change coverage in the media has long received little attention.

The results of such a relatively low level of mobilization are disastrous: One is that governments tend to underestimate the threats that climate change will represent for political and economic continuity in their region. They still view climate change, including its worst trajectories, as a problem that can and will be managed. As a consequence, by failing to appreciate the long-term threats climate change represents, governments fail to organize the systemic type of change that would help to prevent the worst possible scenarios of climate collapse. By failing to tackle change from a systemic perspective, the Arab world faces a likelihood of profound collapse, which will lead to systematic population displacement to other regions.

Impact and Risk Conveyors

Water

Unsurprisingly, the first direct impacts of average global and regional warming collide with water systems on the one hand and food systems on the other. As the planet’s average temperature rises, more water is sucked into the atmosphere and turns into water vapor, which in turn supercharges the disruptive effects of carbon dioxide. Droughts, floods, and fires are the primary forms of climate disruptions that have become common and are destabilizing the Arab region and elsewhere. Nearly half of the population in the region has already experienced acute and protracted effects of drought, which is usually followed by intense episodes of flooding. These forms of disruptions are all signs of too much or too little water. In other words, one of the key drivers of vulnerability in the Arab region has been the gradual and sustained degradation of the hydrological cycle.

This is a vulnerability that has built up over time: some would trace it back to as far as the birth of agricultural societies in the Fertile Crescent area of the modern Middle East. This water cycle degradation makes the Arab region the planet’s most water-insecure area of the world. Apart from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan, all countries in the region suffer from per capita water poverty, a reality that will only worsen unless multidimensional cooperation avenues are introduced. Water stress and water poverty eventually reverberate in all aspects of societal resilience: They impact food security, health security, energy security, and, more widely, the likelihood of quality sustainable development. In addition, water insecurity is expected to increase dramatically. According to the UN Development Programme, an additional 80 to 100 million people are anticipated to experience acute water stress as early as 2025 due to disrupted rainfall patterns and aquifer recharge capacities. In other words, water insecurity is on its way to becoming a fundamental aspect of systemic risk that impacts various sectors, including human health and mobility. The costs of multidimensional reverberations of water insecurity are often unaccounted for, yet they debilitate economic performance and political stability. With climate change, water bankruptcy is likely to bring governance, economic, and fiscal bankruptcy, too.

Food

Less water necessarily means less food security. This will affect the Arab region at national and collective levels and in direct and indirect manners. In a direct manner, the inability of soils to retain water and store carbon means that soils in the region will more rapidly lose their productive capacity, which will have deleterious impacts on those who rely on agriculture for their livelihoods and social resilience. From a macroeconomic perspective, the reliance on agriculture varies by country. For example, it is higher in Egypt than it is in Saudi Arabia. In spite of efforts to try and reinforce national food security in the face of obvious disruptions, the Arab region remains, on the whole, reliant on food imports, and increasingly so. Tunisia, for example, has decreased its agriculture contribution to overall GDP by 3 percentage points compared to 2010. Food import reliance exposes the region to two types of issues that may turn into indirect systemic risk conveyance.

The first relates to the way in which climate disruptions are stacking odds against political and economic integration and creating intergenerational challenges that limit adaptation capacity in some countries. This creates brittle foundations for economies to prosper in a rapidly warming region. In a country like Tunisia, agriculture is an important sector, but people who focus on agriculture tend to feel marginalized and receive less policy attention. In turn, the experience of marginalization can lead to political discontent associated with feelings of injustice and socioeconomic, as well as territorial, fragmentation. To give an example, agriculture is most prominent in interior regions while tourism is most often associated with coastal regions. The latter will experience long-term changes as the sea level rises. In the meantime, economic and political power will remain concentrated in various ways around coastal economies, as is already the case, while interior regions will keep experiencing degradation of economic and social opportunities. The lack of economic prospects is not new in interior regions and has already festered into security issues. The advent of the Arab Spring in Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia was but one famous example. The situation, before and since then, has been protracted and led to continued frustration with government policy against a backdrop of worsening drought and environmental issues. The buildup of discontent has led the central government over time to try and restrict labor migration and contain youth populations on the basis of security concerns.¹ The lack of movement options, combined with desolate landscapes where monocultures exhaust ecological integrity, constitute a bedrock of socioeconomic potential for destabilization in which young people feel like the government tries to contain them without providing viable options for the future.

This brittleness is then easily magnified and expanded in an import-oriented economy whose food and energy commodity prices can spike radically, whether due to climate-related breadbasket failures (as was seen during the Arab Spring) or grain export weaponization (as is currently being witnessed during the Ukraine war). This is an indirect risk conveyance: political stability can be elusive when inflationary pressures and economic destitution hit territorially and economically marginalized populations the hardest, especially when these populations actually represent a majority of the country. And it is likely to remain so in a world where climate change advances much faster than originally modeled by the IPCC—and where breadbasket failures are bound to increase as long as the world fails to turn the tide on conventional and input-dependent agriculture.

Impacts Beyond Water and Food

The story of climate disruptions and structurally embedded fragility is well known in the Arab region, not least because it in part drove the revolutionary swell of the Arab Spring in light of inflationary pressures on staple crops, a process that lit up movements aiming to overthrow dictatorial regimes unable to care for vulnerability in their population. Climate change impacts do not limit themselves to water and food. They only start there and expand into energy disruptions, as Iraq made visible over the last two summers with long-lasting power cuts. They also extend to health issues, with the growing threat of dust storms that bring the economies subject to these occurrences to a stall and contribute to a growing health crisis. These various forms of crises amount to multidimensional fragility, which creates bottom-up pressures on governments and societies.

This compounding fragility is significant because it stands on the shoulders of widening and structural inequalities, which the region experiences at national and regional levels. Indeed, the Arab world is characterized by some of the direst levels of inequalities in the world. In the region, the wealthiest 10 percent of people control 81 percent of net wealth (up from the prepandemic level of 75 percent). It is expected that an additional 10 million people in the region will fall into extreme poverty by 2023­—a number that will likely grow as a result of water scarcity.

Beyond the aggregate regional data, the differences between countries are significant too: conflict-affected countries such as Iraq or Yemen have fundamental troubles climbing the development ladder compared to neighboring countries such as Saudi Arabia or the UAE. The structural and regional inequalities tell a larger story when informed by IPCC findings. Indeed, in its February 2022 report, Working Group II demonstrated clearly that more unequal societies and regions are least likely to adapt to climate change on a structural level, making de-development and conflict risks more plausible. In other words, climate change will widen current levels of inequality and poverty, likely cause reversals in development gains, and therefore pose challenges of new proportions for countries whose national and regional baselines are already fragile.

In the face of such prospects, examining current adaptation approaches is key to understand how the Arab world may shape up in the future.

Resilience Building, Geoeconomics, and Technosolutionism

Resilience in the Arab world is a delicate matter. It depends on global and regional strategies to move as fast as possible away from fossil fuel dependencies and on simultaneous investments into deep adaptation. The faster the energy transition, the more chances the Arab region will have to avoid inhabitability in the medium term. Logically, this should be incentive enough. But several odds play against this realization.

The first stumbling blocks start with fossil dependency. Fossil exports have created rentier economies in a number of countries across the region. Rents are closely linked to power distribution systems, which creates a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it generates path dependency. Elites are unlikely to give up the source of their economic and political power as they maintain important patronage and redistribution systems. Changing energy systems would mean changing the way in which power is administered and shared. Moreover, as over 80 percent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels, countries dependent on fossil exports have little decisive incentive to shift away to alternative investments. As the war in Ukraine demonstrated, fossil fuel–exporting countries like Saudi Arabia remain at the heart of the global economic metabolism—a leverage of force that fossil-dependent countries are unlikely to want to give up.

This energy and power path dependency has three consequences. One is that countries like Saudi Arabia are actively choosing policies and energy production systems that compound the rapidly unfolding climate breakdown. The second has to do with climate finance. Funds for adaptation measures keep falling short. Indeed, in late 2022, adaptation funds only represented about 10 percent of overall climate finance. This provides an easy rationale for fossil-fuel-dependent countries: They argue they need the money generated from fossil fuel rents to invest in deep adaptation. But if fossil fuels keep creating a rentier path dependency, they say, then the only solution is to go toward technosolutionism for fossil-dependent countries.

Technosolutionism relies on the belief that carbon capture and removal systems will enable the world to keep up its business as usual and that technological innovation will eventually stall climate-related disasters. This belief assumes technologies will be developed in time to allow for deep mitigation and deep adaptation. For example, Saudi Arabia and the UA E are among rising investors in carbon capture and carbon removal technologies, which, if proven effective enough and taken at scale, would enable these countries to maintain their dependency on fossil exports. Yet, so far, no technological solution has been proven to work effectively enough, and certainly not at scale. Taken too far, technosolutionism may well contribute to making the climate crisis worse by delaying the radical type of action needed to turn the ship.

This belief in technology is not just confined to the energy sector. It extends into a technologically oriented approach toward adaptation, including for water, food, and habitability security. The most affluent countries in the Arab region are in fact using the climate crisis and their ability to invest in innovative technologies to propel themselves into a new type of technology-driven economy, understood to be one of the next frontiers of economic growth and competition. This is the case with the UAE’s attempt to support the drive toward “smart sustainable cities.” It is equally the case with Saudi Arabia’s attempts to invest in smart agriculture and other technology-supported ways to generate water security, including expensive forms of desalination and water conversion and diversion. The dual strategy to keep current forms of rentier economies while investing into complementary ones that aim to mitigate the effects of climate change in the region represents a new type of regional, political, and rent-harvesting opportunity for those countries. But it is one that comes at a high cost for others in the region. One only has to look at the investments originally made in the Great Man-Made River in Libya, which are now resulting in national conflict drivers, as well as potential regional tensions with Egypt over Nubian aquifers due to geological water pumping.

The systemic costs of continued fossil dependency and technosolutionism make sense: Not all countries in the region are as well-endowed in economic resources as the UEA and Saudi Arabia. Places like Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen lack capital access and political space to invest in deep-technology forms of adaptation. The more climate-related disruptions that come their way, the greater the challenges and crises to deal with over time and the less fiscal and economic space they have to handle those crises. The cooperative space between countries in the region will be rigged by countries that generally try to use the climate crisis to their own advantage, while underestimating the might of the problem, and those that experience the full set of climate disruptions, without having extensive resources to deal with the consequences at home and in border regions. In all likelihood, this will indeed lead to a future scenario where conflict dynamics worsen and economies of countries already affected by violence stunt—fitting the depiction of climate change as a risk multiplier.

Such will be the case in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, for example. In these countries, ecological services will keep on degrading as a direct result of the acceleration of climate breakdown. Thus conflicts will most likely concentrate in areas of relative abundance, that is, in places where water resources remain relatively available. Relative abundance results in competition for available resources in the context of a growing population and leads, over time, to potential weaponization. In a country like Iraq, relatively abundant zones could include marshes, a wetland-type ecosystem that has historically led to the rise of agriculture and still sustains important livelihoods in the Fertile Crescent. The more this ecosystem is disrupted, the less ecological services it will provide and the more degradation will lead to destitution without adequate means of adaptation. The end result is not just a multiplication of security challenges related to the loss of livelihoods and human insecurity; if states keep failing to provide fundamental solutions and services in the face of growing disruptions, social contracts will rupture beyond repair.

Beyond national challenges, the overall impact of sustained dependency on fossil fuels may create new forms of regional challenges, in addition to existing ones. As mentioned, climate change needs to be understood as the great redistributor of natural resources, starting with water. In the Arab world, major countries tend to share transboundary water basins that are under direct threat of accelerating climate change. Upstream and downstream countries tend to lack the cooperative infrastructures that may lead to joint stability. This is the result of historically tense relations and, more recently, of the increasing threat of scarcity that leads to having countries pit respective visions of development against one another. Most notably, Egypt and Ethiopia—home to two of the most important tributaries of the Nile River—have escalated geopolitical tensions over river and infrastructure management to the UN Security Council without reaching a resolution so far. Tensions between Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey keep surfacing over water management around the Euphrates and Tigris river systems. Turkey controls over 90 percent of the water that goes into the Euphrates River and more than 40 percent of the water that goes into the Tigris river system. Ankara has been accused on several occasions of weaponizing water to purse its own geopolitical objectives in a region that is prone to deep violence and turmoil.

In all cases regarding transboundary issues, the construction of hydropower infrastructure and nationally determined plans tend to pit countries with more financial capacity against others, often driven by elites who skew decisionmaking regarding public goods. The result is natural capital protectionism. In a context where natural resources are rapidly running scarce, this can easily be perceived in a belligerent light. And, currently, mediation or negotiation mechanisms are simply inadequate even when they are utilized, which is seldom the case. The use of cooperative processes and infrastructures is likely to increase alongside the threat of insecurity and belligerence. The problem is that these processes will occur in a reactive manner and fail to address fundamental insecurity drivers.

The reliance on technology and infrastructure is likely to create more and more fractures at national and regional levels in the future. Plans to divert water, desalinate it, and make its use more efficient tend to fall into an energy-versus-natural-resource trap over time. Technology requires energy. In the Arab world, the more convenient source of energy is also the source of the problems that technologies try to fix when natural resources are scarce. And, innovative technology requires monetary and fiscal resources that are likely to be increasingly used for disaster risk reduction and management. The technosolutionist logic may seem appealing for now, as climate-related changes are underestimated and as long as climate change is relegated to a topic of growing yet manageable concern. Over time, climate degradation may trap countries that fail to prepare in an impossible economic equation and security dilemma. This is why the use of technology needs to be accompanied by larger systemic changes, starting with a plan to stabilize the hydrological cycle at regional levels and, if successful, at global levels.

Transformative Cooperation: Dual Investments Into Decarbonization and Regeneration at Scale

The Arab world faces a dual challenge. One is to shift its economies and energy systems into renewable investments, and the other is to work toward stabilizing and regenerating the hydrological cycle to reboot ecological services and strengthen climate adaptation and resilience.

Remediating the systematic assaults against the hydrological cycle in the region is crucial in order to mitigate climate-related disruptions related to water evaporation. Only by working with the hydrological cycle will countries manage to rebuild water resilience over time rather than navigate scarcity. This requires a different approach to water and security. All states in the region have an interest in trying to rebuild the quality of their soil, starting with its ability to retain water and store carbon. This would necessitate repositioning agriculture and ecological services at the heart of policy and urban and rural planning with a view to shift away from economic activities that are inappropriate to the region’s soils and ecological conditions. To start with, a shift toward regenerative agriculture should be considered as a matter of priority for disaster, conflict, and insecurity prevention in climate-disrupted futures. Incentivizing regenerative, complex, soil-specific agricultures would also have the benefit of providing a different economic vision for countries in the region, especially those that feel territorially and socioeconomically marginalized. It is therefore not just about rebooting productive agriculture; it is actually about tackling systemic changes from the literal ground up, rethinking the way in which socioeconomic fabrics maintain themselves over time and how mobility is envisaged. It is, at the core, a question of dignity (karama, as Arab Spring protesters chanted in 2011 and keep on demanding today).

Beyond agriculture, regenerative approaches should include landscaping changes for disasters and adaptation. Several experiments have already demonstrated that landscaping techniques can be used in arid and semi-arid areas to stock water in times of inundations. The techniques can also contribute to rebuilding ecological resilience in desertified areas, which can help with carbon storage and ecological rebooting. Finally, regenerative processes can be used to support mediation over transboundary issues in the Arab world, particularly when it comes to water management. This requires shifting the mediation focus from managing to fighting and reversing scarcity through confidence-building measures and cooperative frameworks. It also involves working with data-driven methodologies that make apparent the hydrological cycle and atmospheric rivers that bind together countries of the Arab world. By working with the hydrological cycle and trying to bring water back from its gas form into water bodies and aquifers, there may be hope of increasing more reliable weather and rainfall patterns, including in the age of climate disruptions.

Working with the hydrological cycle involves complex methodologies and economic sector changes. It is a more diffuse and inclusive type of adaptation, since it involves rebuilding human societies that nourish ecological services as much as they take from them. Technical support for this work is scarce, but it is slowly starting to emerge within the region as one area of potential engagement and as a conflict prevention approach. Appetite for innovative approaches for transformative integrated conflict and climate disaster prevention is growing. Tools exist, but they need to be tested and refined. At this point of looming climate breakdown, countries in the regions would do well to open up to adaptation avenues that are less conventional, yet potentially disruptive for the better. The good news is that economic resources may gradually become more available if carbon markets are connected to this type of adaptation work. Carbon credits, defined as financial schemes payable to carbon storage projects or facilities, are most often associated with finance flowing to ecosystems like the Amazon Rainforest. They are rarely considered for the Arab world since soils are so dry and vegetation so scarce compared to other regions of the world. But it is a mistake to think the Arab world cannot play its part in rebuilding ecological services that include carbon storage. In fact, this region may well be a low-hanging fruit for effective carbon finance flows.

These financial flows will have to be limited in timeframe, though, since they should stop when fossil fuels are phased out. This is where the Arab world also needs to play an active role. It is not just about investing in solar and wind farms or electrified systems; it is also about investing in a new set of supply chains and technological innovations that will define the future of stability for energy and industrial systems in the years to come. It is also, therefore, about investing in the new type of geopolitical relations that will shape international relations in the decades to come.

A number of economies in the Arab world have leverage to play into the new energy ecosystems of tomorrow. Finance is needed to accelerate extraction, processing, technological development, and end-use installations. In addition, new regional integrations for energy resilience need to be designed and planned. The green revolution is not a panacea for peace. No energy transition in the history of humankind has gone without deep turbulence. But there is indeed something different about this one: It is not just a matter of competition for the next phase of economic expansion; it is a matter of survival, and nowhere but the Arab region demonstrates better the need for investments and climate action to move fast. And no region has more of an incentive nor greater agency to shift directions toward the age of renewables, even if it entails some changes in power distribution structures.

Conclusion

Conflict and cooperation will coexist in the Arab world, and both trends are likely to intensify in the near future. But the most important aspect lies beyond the binary: Humanity is not just facing the plausibility of increased conflict or violence. In the case of the Arab world, humanity is facing the possibility of inhabitability. An area of over 13 million square kilometers that hosts over 430 million people is on its way to becoming unfit for human living. This is unprecedented and, frankly, difficult to imagine. Yet, taking this fast-approaching reality as the departing point for planning and action is in order. The dual priorities of regeneration and decarbonization require changes in political economies of power and resource distribution, which currently represent the major obstacles to change. Elites, especially in the wealthiest of countries of the Arab world, must become aware of their responsibilities and interests in the age of climate adaptation, lest they have no country to govern in the next two to three decades.

Notes

¹ Author’s field work, 2018.

More than a decade after the 2011 Arab uprisings, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) continues to face unprecedented levels of displacement. Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita (one in eight), followed by Jordan (one in fourteen) and Türkiye (one in twenty-three) (see figure 1). Millions of Iraqis, Syrians, and Yemenis also remain internally displaced, with 2.6 of the 4 million Yemeni internally displaced individuals facing life-threatening food shortages. Across the region, the ongoing war in Ukraine has increased food and fuel prices and further disrupted supply chains, exacerbating the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and raising the cost of delivering humanitarian assistance to refugees and displaced people. In the coming decades, the effects of climate change will also compound the existing conflict-driven reasons that lead individuals to flee their home regions or countries, whether droughts, rising sea levels, food insecurity as a result of crop failure, or desertification.

These challenges—conflict, poor governance, climate change, and a worsening economic picture—have created immense difficulties for migrants, refugees, and other vulnerable populations originating from and residing in the MENA region. These include the ongoing fallout from the Syrian civil war and the lack of a durable solution for most Syrian refugees; the international displacement of Iraqis, Yemenis, and Syrians, which is only compounded by pressures of climate change; and the lack of safe migratory options for citizens and non-nationals in North Africa. As Europe remains focused on brokering deals to contain migrants and refugees within MENA host states—despite attempts at improved international responsibility sharing, such as the 2018 Global Compact for Migration—countries across the region will continue to grapple with the political, economic, and societal impacts of migration. Without investments in climate resilience, responsive governance, and equitable social policies and without opportunities for regular migration as an adaptive mechanism, displacement may exacerbate existing inequalities and social tensions.

Safe Return for Refugees and Regional Stability

The war in Syria, the biggest driver of human-caused displacement in the Middle East over the last decade, has transformed the region and left millions displaced with no prospect of safe return. Little has changed in terms of the circumstances—repression, regime violence, and the exploitation of sectarian and religious divisions—that caused individuals to flee in the first place. Since 2011, this situation has contributed to regional insecurity and impacted domestic politics in a range of host countries, including Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Türkiye (see figure 2). Although the implications of the conflict continue to reverberate, the war effectively ended in 2019, with President Bashar al-Assad’s regime reasserting control over most of the country, leaving smaller regions in the northwest and northeast under the sway of two opposition groups, the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), respectively.

Over the past five years, an international push for refugees to return to Syria had gained momentum among major host states, driven partly by a decree the Assad regime issued in 2018 offering amnesty to Syrian men who fled the country to avoid military conscription—but not to those who had joined opposition forces. In reality, returning to Syria is a gamble. Amnesty International has documented dozens of cases of Syrian intelligence officers subjecting men, women, and children to detention, torture, sexual violence, and forced disappearance. By the end of 2022, only approximately 350,000 Syrians had returned to Syria, though actual figures may be higher as returns also occur via informal routes.

Assad has normalized relations with a number of Arab countries, including the UAE and Bahrain, and in early 2023 there were indications of a possible rapprochement between Assad and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Observers have pointed to how the arrangement would serve both sides. Syria hopes to remove SDF forces from the areas containing oil fields in northeast Syria and needs support from Ankara to do so. In turn, Türkiye hopes to both eliminate the Kurdish armed presence and organizational capacity in Syria and, likely, attempt to return Syrian refugees from Türkiye to Syria under the auspices of the United Nations and other international organizations. Erdoğan also wants to exploit the idea of a Syrian-Turkish rapprochement to strengthen his domestic support ahead of the scheduled May 2023 presidential election. 

While it is unlikely that the majority of the nearly 4 million Syrians in Türkiye would return, full normalization could still be devastating. Türkiye has financed the Islamist militants of the Syrian National Army (SNA), who fought against Syrian Kurdish forces on behalf of Ankara, and it also hosts the Syrian National Coalition, the largest coalition of Assad opponents. Since the summer of 2022, Erdoğan has been asking these groups for reconciliation with Damascus—an impossible request from the point of view of the opposition. While Türkiye has returned refugees to Syria previously, in apparent contravention of international law, those who returned were able to reside in regions where the Assad regime had not established full control. However, if the rapprochement succeeds in fully quashing the Syrian opposition, many of the returnees would be at high risk of persecution and retaliation.

The devastating 7.8-magnitude earthquake in February 2023 gravely impacted nationals as well as refugees and displaced people in both Türkiye and Syria. The Turkish city of Gaziantep, the epicenter of the first quake, hosts 500,000 Syrian refugees, with hundreds of thousands of others residing throughout southeast Türkiye. The Turkish public has shown some resentment toward Syrians since at least 2014—waxing and waning depending on domestic political events—but the earthquake reaggravated tensions, with Turkish nationals resentful of the $40 billion spent by the government since 2011 to host Syrians in light of the perceived inadequate response to the earthquake. In northeast Syria, even before the earthquake, 4.1 million people, predominantly women and children, were relying on humanitarian assistance to survive. As a result of the Syrian regime’s choke hold, supported by Russia, on aid entering opposition-controlled areas, UN assistance could initially only enter Syria from Türkiye via the Bab al-Hawa crossing, which was damaged by the quake. The Syrian government eventually allowed for two additional crossings from Türkiye to open to UN aid convoys, but even then, many residents in the region were forced to rely on makeshift methods of rescuing families and individuals trapped under the rubble, and many were left without shelter.

Lebanon officially hosts approximately 850,000 registered Syrian refugees, in addition to an estimated 650,000 unregistered Syrians. There are nearly 250,000 migrant domestic workers in the country and approximately 210,000 Palestinians (including Palestinians from Syria) registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The devaluation of Lebanon’s currency by over 90 percent and the COVID-19 pandemic have led to unprecedented poverty rates, which disproportionally impact refugee and migrant populations and poorer host communities. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimates that 90 percent of Syrians in Lebanon live in extreme poverty, and UNRWA calculates that 93 percent of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon also live in poverty. Furthermore, Lebanon as a whole, and at-risk communities in particular, face acute food insecurity; Lebanon imports 80 percent of its wheat, and of that figure, 80 percent historically came from Ukraine and 16 percent from Russia. The country’s storage capacity was greatly diminished following the Port of Beirut explosion and the destruction of the port silos in August 2020.

Jordan hosts approximately 600,000 registered Syrian refugees, 700,000 unregistered individuals, and 17,000 Palestinians from Syria. While not facing the same economic crisis as Lebanon, 80 percent of Syrians in Jordan live in poverty. At the same time that the costs of basic necessities including food and healthcare have risen and livelihoods have been slashed as a result of the pandemic, international organizations that provide assistance to refugees (such as the World Food Programme) have cut programs due to funding shortfalls.

Despite these dire situations, and even with small numbers of Syrians voluntarily and involuntarily returning from Lebanon and Jordan just as they have from Türkiye, most Syrians will remain in the countries where they currently live in the medium term. A 2019 survey of Syrians in Lebanon suggested that refugees will not willingly go home before local conditions are deemed safe and economic livelihoods can be supported, even with worsening conditions in host countries. Issues of property restitution and an inability to obtain necessary documentation, including birth certificates and passports, are also major barriers to return. According to international legal norms, refugee repatriation should only happen under conditions that can ensure safety and dignity and should not contravene the principle of nonrefoulement, meaning that refugees cannot be sent back to a location where their lives could be in danger. In the Syrian case in particular, forcibly returning refugees to a country that continues to be governed by the regime from which they fled could restart cycles of violence and repression, ultimately making the possibility of future conflict more likely. Moreover, the economic devastation as well as food and fuel insecurity in Syria have meant that even areas loyal to the Assad regime throughout the war have recently expressed discontent. Aside from issues of safety, refugees and internally displaced returnees will face dire economic circumstances, making it more likely that individuals will attempt to remain in host countries—Jordan, Lebanon, or Türkiye—in the medium term.

Internal Displacement as a Growing Challenge

The intersection of climate change, economic instability, and poor governance is making internal displacement an increasingly difficult challenge in many Arab countries. In Iraq, displacement reached a peak in 2016 as a cumulative result of the U.S. invasion, sectarian violence, and the expansion of the Islamic State. Since then, overall displacement has declined, but Iraq still hosts more than 1 million internally displaced people (IDPs), as well as nearly 5 million IDP returnees, many of whom have struggled to fully reintegrate and continue to require humanitarian assistance. In addition, 1.5 million displaced Iraqi and Syrian refugees reside in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where 25 percent of the population is displaced. In 2021, the government of Iraq took steps to address IDPs with its National Plan to End Displacement. In reality, though, the closure of camps across the country led to premature returns that particularly impacted women-headed households, leaving many individuals and families to deal with administrative hurdles that prevented them from properly accessing government services and welfare benefits. Most recently, in February 2023, the government announced a new plan to transition IDPs away from humanitarian assistance provided by international actors to a government-run social assistance program, though whether this will run into similar administrative barriers remains to be seen.

The repatriation of the approximately 30,000 Iraqi nationals in Syria’s al-Hol camp, most of whom are women and children, has also proven extremely difficult. Individuals are first taken to Jeddah-1 camp, located in Iraq’s Nineveh province, where they spend several months or more undergoing security screenings and so-called rehabilitation, though even successfully repatriated individuals continue to struggle with community acceptance and administrative issues.

Finally, existing displacement issues in Iraq will be compounded by rising temperatures and drought, as well as the possibility of future political tensions leading to mismanagement of the shared Euphrates-Tigris water basin. Southern Iraq already faces water insecurity, and more than 90 percent of Iraq’s population is dependent on the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers, which are at historically low levels. Iraq’s Indigenous Marsh Arabs are exemplars of the risk that climate change poses to traditional ways of life. In addition to historical political actions, such as those taken by former president Saddam Hussein, to destroy their livelihoods and environment by intentionally draining Iraq’s marshlands, climate change threatens to further displace this population, forcing many into urban areas where issues such as overcrowding and a lack of services might fuel discontent.

In Yemen, there are more than 4 million IDPs, and the country also hosts nearly 1 million refugees and asylum seekers, primarily from the Horn of Africa. Climate change was a dire issue in Yemen prior to the civil war, but eight years of fighting has further stressed limited resources, and the breakdown of basic government services as well as blockades by warring factions have compounded existing water and food shortages. The weaponization of water has also exacerbated the acute famine in Yemen and prolonged conflict. While the climate crisis impacts all Yemenis, IDPs are at particular risk, as their temporary homes are especially vulnerable to flooding and those residing in camps are less likely to have regular access to drinking water and food. Women and girls have also been acutely affected, as they are usually responsible for gathering water, leading them to undertake unsafe journeys into conflict-impacted areas with greater exposure to land mines.

While Iraq and Yemen are two of the most harrowing examples of how years of conflict can interact with poor governance and climate change to produce and endanger IDPs, they represent cautionary tales for how countries across the region might be impacted in the future. As seen in Iraq, the arrival of IDPs can strain existing resources, potentially leading to discontent or even violence, while Yemen demonstrates how the effects of climate change can reify the human challenges created by ongoing conflict. As most displaced individuals globally remain within their own country, rather than moving across international borders, the multifaceted set of factors that lead to the creation of IDPs will be an increasingly salient issue going forward.

The EU’s Ongoing Containment of Migration

Since Europe’s political crisis in 2015 in reaction to the arrival of asylum seekers, most of whom originated from Syria, migration has played an increasingly important role in European relations with MENA countries. On the heels of what Europe perceived as a successful migration deal with Türkiye in 2016, whereby Türkiye would accept Syrian refugees arriving in Greece in exchange for €6 billion and other diplomatic benefits, Italy agreed to a deal in 2017 (endorsed by the EU) with the UN-backed Libyan Government of National Accord (GNA). The EU agreed to assist the Libyan Coast Guard in apprehending migratory boats departing Libya and to financially support the establishment of detention centers (referred to as local reception centers) in the country. In exchange, the GNA would further prevent irregular migration toward Europe and repatriate migrants and asylum seekers willing to return to their origin countries. More brazen than the EU-Türkiye deal, the agreement with Libya ignored known human rights abuses, and, shortly after its implementation, journalists revealed images of migrants being traded at slave auctions. EU financial and material support also has implications for Libyan citizens, as armed groups affiliated with the GNA have carried out torture, abductions, and extrajudicial executions. While EU funding was initially correlated with a decrease in migrant arrivals via the central Mediterranean route, the number of arrivals increased from around 35,000 in 2020 to 105,000 in 2022, illustrating that Europe’s policy of trapping migrants in Libya not only comes at an enormous human cost but is also ineffective.

Neighboring Egypt was not initially as interested in migration agreements with Europe, but President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has become one of the EU’s most praised partners on preventing irregular migration. Egypt is the most populous state in the Arab world, with just over 100 million citizens residing in the country, in addition to approximately 250,000 asylum seekers and refugees, though Sisi has famously exaggerated this number at 5 million refugees. The country faces a debt crisis that preceded the 2011 uprising but that has worsened drastically over the last decade, and Cairo has been slow to implement the fiscal reforms required by its 2016 loan from the International Monetary Fund. As a major importer of wheat, Egypt has also been hugely impacted by the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and subsequent war, and in January 2023, the Egyptian pound hit a new low when the government implemented a more flexible exchange rate. Egypt’s large population and economic woes have made Europe fearful of large-scale emigration from the country, leading the EU to seek Egypt’s assistance in preventing its own nationals from departing and also in intercepting and returning migrant boats departing from Libya. In exchange, Europe has been willing to offer development and security aid, including the provision of military equipment. In September 2022, the EU confirmed that €23 million would be allocated to Cairo over the remainder of the year, in addition to €57 million in 2023, to further equip Egyptian authorities to carry out “search and rescue” missions and conduct “surveillance at land and sea borders.” Yet, as with Libya, there are very few provisions in place to prevent negative spillover effects and violence from authorities toward migrants and Egyptian citizens alike. Additionally, by praising Egypt’s capabilities as a partner on antitrafficking and irregular migration prevention, the EU helps to distract from international criticism over the Egyptian government’s ongoing human rights abuses.

Morocco was already deeply involved with various forms of European externalization efforts prior to 2015, but since then Rabat has sought to take further advantage of the increased funding allotted for EU migration partnerships. Morocco and Spain intensified their cooperation around the issue of migration in 2018, with Spain’s secretary of state for migration declaring that Spain would be Morocco’s “voice” in Europe. However, the relationship quickly fell apart in 2021 when Brahim Ghali, the leader of the Polisario Front, was allowed to enter Spain to receive medical treatment for COVID-19, leading Morocco to allow approximately 6,000 African migrants to enter the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in one day. Bilateral relations were later repaired in 2022, which also meant that border policing returned to normal, leading to the deaths of at least twenty-three asylum seekers and migrants attempting to enter Spain’s other enclave, Melilla, in June.

Tunisia also has a long history of cooperating with Europe on migration, but European interest in the country increased greatly after 2020. The pandemic-related economic downturn had led to increased pressure for Tunisians—and to a lesser extent, migrants that had been residing in Tunisia—to migrate irregularly to Europe. With President Kais Saied’s increasingly authoritarian turn since 2019 and his inability to address the country’s economic issues, it is unlikely that even European-financed border measures will prevent the irregular migration of Tunisian nationals, especially as the composition of those departing is increasingly middle-class and composed of entire families, illustrating the desperation felt by citizens across socioeconomic strata.

Migration Challenges Exacerbated by Climate Change

More than a decade of war has eroded states’ abilities to mitigate the effects of climate change, leaving key populations—especially migrants, refugees, and displaced populations—vulnerable to climate impacts because nonresidents and noncitizens are often accorded lower priority for services or because they may not have legal status in a host country. Looking forward across the region, the numerous impacts of climate change will have varying effects on migration and displacement, as states have vastly different adaptation capabilities. For example, populations in poorer countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Libya, and Syria will feel the impact acutely. In Iraq, recent summer temperatures have reached peaks of 125 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to disturbed livelihoods, heatstroke, and, in some cases, death. In comparison, Gulf states have the economic means to mitigate the effects of extreme heat, even though a rise in global temperature will particularly impact them. The UAE has the world’s highest per capita water consumption levels, and predictions indicate that population growth could lead the country to deplete its freshwater resources in the next fifty years. It is unclear whether Gulf countries will be able to maintain their extremely high levels of labor migration absent any meaningful rights to workers, as environmental pressures increase and the possibility of oil and gas depletion looms on the horizon.

As discussed in the previous section, the vast majority of individuals displaced by climate change will migrate within their own countries; only some will be able to cross international borders. According to the World Bank, up to 19 million individuals across North Africa could be forced to move internally by 2050 due to climate change impacts including water scarcity, sea level rise, or crop failure. Projections of climate-induced displacement across the MENA region are equally worrying. It is also important to note that displacement related to climate change is likely to be gendered, with the UN estimating that 80 percent of individuals currently displaced by climate change are women. As sudden-onset climate events lead to a breakdown of infrastructure and governance, the likelihood of human trafficking greatly increases, which has a disproportionate impact on women and girls. Even when women do not migrate themselves, they may be expected to assume duties traditionally left to men after an incidence of crop failure or water scarcity causes a male head of household to migrate in order to search for alternative livelihood opportunities. However, in many Arab states, women may not have the same authority as men over legal issues or may be discriminated against in land ownership or inheritance laws.

It is not possible to conceive of an adequate response to future climate-induced displacement across the MENA region without reversing the trend of European countries attempting to contain migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees within MENA, a trend that has been amplified since 2015. Despite the adoption of the nonbinding Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration and its companion agreement, the Global Compact on Refugees, in 2018, the compacts have had little impact on the pattern of states outsourcing migration prevention, with deleterious effects for migrants and refugees. And while lip service is paid to funding climate adaptation policies as part of the EU’s external migration management aid—through pots of money such as the 2015 EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa—the majority of funding goes to further securitizing borders and supporting regimes with grave human rights records.

Rich countries of the Global North—and in this case, particularly countries of the EU—must be prepared to increase opportunities for mobility, including through humanitarian visas, private sponsorships, educational opportunities, and temporary work permits for those forced to leave their countries due to precarious situations. At the very least, the EU must reverse course on its untenable policy of containing displaced populations within MENA host states and subsequently turning a blind eye to their plight. Ultimately though, governments across the MENA region will have to address pervasive issues including poverty, inequality, and corruption in order to mitigate the current and impending impacts of a changing climate for their populations, including both citizens and migrants. It was these same unaddressed issues that gave rise to the uprisings of 2011, the heavy-handed response to which drove the subsequent displacement of the last decade. Yet, with the advent of climate change and the increasingly serious challenge it will pose in the coming years, the stakes are even higher than they were twelve years ago. Governments in the region, with the support of the international community, must focus on providing more equitable services, developing inclusive socioeconomic policies, and instating climate change mitigation processes that benefit all populations in order to avoid exacerbating the very underlying factors that induce further displacement.

The COVID-19 pandemic left no part of the globe untouched. Across the world, governments responded in varying manners to try to control the virus and to limit its effects on their populations and their livelihoods. The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is no different. Although many countries were spared from the initial global wave of infections, by the fall of 2020 large-scale outbreaks affected much of the region. Over the next two years, citizens were forced to adapt to the changing environment and to lockdowns, economic shocks, and the rising cost of living, among other challenges.

The effects of COVID-19 on the region have been examined from a number of perspectives, especially the tragic loss of human life. Initially, much of the focus was on the public health angle, thinking about the challenges that COVID-19 posed to healthcare systems and the weaknesses it exposed. Additionally, the pandemic’s economic costs have received substantial attention, including the costs for everyday lives. Lockdowns forced hardships on many households whose members may not have been able to work, while subsequent shortages in supply chains have led to rising costs for goods.

What has received less attention is how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the views and attitudes of ordinary citizens toward their governments and toward each other in the MENA region. The pandemic has the possibility to affect relations between citizens and their governments: ordinary people may blame governments for the perceived failure to protect their health and economic security. It also may affect how they view their governments’ justifications for limiting their basic rights or freedoms, seeing as how most governments across the region restricted basic liberties (such as freedom of movement) in the name of public health. Finally, this crisis may have changed how citizens view each other. Social relations were vastly affected during lockdowns, with households being forced to remain together, for example.

Using data from Arab Barometer, the region’s largest publicly available source for public opinion data, this essay considers the changes in the views and attitudes of ordinary citizens as a result of the pandemic. The survey found that confidence in government remains low in the MENA region, although this trend does not appear to be dramatically affected by the coronavirus pandemic. However, a more detailed analysis suggests that the longer-term economic challenges that emerged from the pandemic may further hurt the standing of governments in their citizens’ eyes. In terms of views of rights, perhaps counterintuitively, the survey found that most citizens were more likely to say they enjoyed basic rights than before the pandemic, but this likely relates to their comparison of the state of their rights today versus the heavy restrictions that existed during the early pandemic era. Additionally, the survey found that citizens were reluctant to give up their basic rights even during times of emergencies such as COVID-19. Finally, this essay examines the growing support for women’s equality across the MENA region. Although a majority still favored men having power in both the public and private spheres, there has been a recent shift in favor of greater equality. Most likely, this comes down to shifts in daily life brought about by the pandemic and is similar to shifts in favor of gender equality observed in other regions of the world.

Domestic Political Actors

For much of the 2010s, perceptions of government had been worsening in the MENA region. Broadly speaking, citizens were losing faith in their governments and other political actors and in these actors’ ability to resolve long-standing challenges, such as low economic growth; high unemployment, especially among youth; and quality public services. The pandemic represented not only a unique challenge but also an opportunity for governments to work toward rebuilding trust with their populations. If MENA governments were able to effectively manage this crisis, they reasoned, it could lead publics to have greater confidence in their ability to address other challenges. In fact, the governments that took drastic steps, including lockdowns and closing borders, fared quite well in the initial days of the pandemic. These actions appeared to have delayed the spread of COVID-19 in most MENA countries. Results from Arab Barometer Wave 6—conducted between July 2020 and April 2021—suggested that citizens strongly supported such measures and rewarded governments that took decisive action in the name of protecting public health.

Yet, the benefits did not last. By fall 2020, most countries in the region had experienced a significant outbreak of the disease, which had dramatic effects on citizens in the region. It also changed how citizens rated governments and their performance overall. As quickly as long-standing trends had given way to greater confidence in governments, the initial gains in confidence were largely lost as governments failed to contain the virus in the medium term.

As the pandemic progressed, the broader effects became clearer. Not only were many lives lost and health systems put under severe strain, but economic outcomes also worsened. Supply chain shortages contributed to significant increases in the cost of living across much of the region. Even governments that had managed the pandemic relatively effectively, such as Morocco, found citizens coming under economic strain from the lasting effects of the pandemic.

Three key emerging challenges were access to basic necessities, a rising cost of living, and increasing economic inequality. In half of the twelve countries that Arab Barometer surveyed between October 2021 and July 2022, more than half of citizens said that within the last year they had run out of food before they had money to buy more. Although this was the first time Arab Barometer included this question, meaning trend data are not available, the degree of hunger in a set of mostly middle-income countries is particularly striking.

Second, there was a strong perception that the rising cost of living was a growing challenge. In most countries surveyed, this was the most common response to the biggest problem that resulted from the pandemic. When respondents were asked to choose among eight potential options, at least one in five chose the rising cost of living. Similarly, when asked about the most important step governments in the region could take to fix economic conditions, lowering the cost of living was, on average, the second most important step after creating jobs. Overall, when asked to pick among eight potential actions, at least one in five (in seven of twelve countries surveyed) selected limiting rising costs as the most important step governments could take.

Rising economic inequality was widely perceived as another major problem across the region. In all twelve countries surveyed, clear majorities said they were concerned about the wealth gap, including at least three-quarters of respondents in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Tunisia. Meanwhile, in six of ten countries where the question was included, half or more said that this gap had increased over the past year, including 83 percent in Jordan, 82 percent in Egypt, and 74 percent in Lebanon.

Views of government appeared strongly linked with concerns about these economic challenges. In none of the nine countries where the question was included in the 2021–2022 wave of the Arab Barometer did a majority say they had confidence in their government. In more than half of the countries, fewer than a third said they trusted their government a great deal or quite a lot.

Isolating the exact effect of COVID-19 on levels of trust in government is challenging in light of confounding events that have also affected public perceptions. For example, despite the desperate situation faced by Tunisia during the pandemic, the election of populist President Kais Saied and his subsequent effective coup in July 2021 more likely affected views of the government than did the pandemic. In this case, Tunisians expressed more confidence in the government in fall 2021 than they did in 2018. Lebanon, a country that underwent a complete financial collapse in 2019, reveals the opposite trend. Although citizens were surely concerned about the government’s weak response to COVID-19, the financial crisis more likely accounted for the decline from 19 percent to 8 percent of respondents who trusted the government over the same period.

The cases of Jordan and Morocco provide additional insight, particularly given that COVID-19 represented the primary challenge faced by both countries during this period. In the case of Jordan, perceptions of government emerged worse than before the pandemic. Although the government’s performance was initially strong and delayed the onset of the coronavirus, by late 2020 Jordan was confronting the worst and deadliest COVID-19 outbreak in the region. Even if there was little the government could do to prevent the virus from entering Jordan, public perceptions of the government fell by 7 points from 2018 to 2022. In contrast, although Morocco also suffered heavily from COVID-19, the trust in government increased during this period. It is plausible that since the government was one of the most ambitious in the region in securing vaccines at an early stage of the pandemic, the public rewarded the government for its relatively strong performance on the issue. Yet, additional analysis suggests other factors may be at play instead.

When asked specifically about how the government did responding to COVID-19, there is relatively little variation. In the vast majority of countries, citizens did not believe that the government did overly well, but they did not blame the government extensively for its handing either. In eight of the eleven countries where the question was asked, between 44 and 62 percent of respondents said the government had done a good or very good job managing the pandemic. In the case of Jordan and Morocco, there was effectively no perceived difference in how the government managed the pandemic, with Jordan at 55 percent and Morocco at 53 percent, suggesting that the divergent changes in levels of trust in government during this period may not be linked with government performance on COVID-19. Notably, in most countries surveyed, ratings of the government’s performance of managing the coronavirus were substantially higher than levels of trust in government.

However, there was a clear correlation between views of how the government managed COVID-19 and levels of trust in government. On average across the region, those who said the government did well on the pandemic were more than twice as likely to say they trusted the government compared to those who said the government did not do well. Although managing COVID-19 well did not yield greater trust for all citizens, it appears that a government’s perceived success at handing the crisis could improve citizens’ confidence in their government overall.

Still, for the longer term, opportunities to rebuild levels of trust in government are likely to be limited. Even if the COVID-19 pandemic’s effect on healthcare systems passes, the longer-term effects from the pandemic and other global challenges, particularly rising cost of living, are likely to grow in importance. Most likely, citizens will return to judging their governments based more on economic performance than on their management of the pandemic.

Economic Concerns

Perceptions of the economy were unfavorable across most of the region. Among countries surveyed, only in Kuwait, a state with vast oil wealth, did a majority rate economic conditions as good or very good. In ten of the remaining eleven countries, at most a third said the economic situation was positive. These levels were extremely low in Jordan (15 percent), Tunisia (14 percent), Sudan (13 percent), and Lebanon (less than 1 percent).

Ratings of the economy were low even before the pandemic and have since declined in some countries. For example, in Jordan nearly a quarter (23 percent) said the economy was good in 2018 compared to 15 percent in 2022, an 8-point decline. Notably, this continues a dramatic decline that predates COVID-19, with the figure having fallen from 46 percent in 2016.

However, domestic events also played a role beyond the challenges from COVID-19. In Tunisia, economic ratings remained low, with 14 percent saying the economy was good—a 7-point increase from 2018. Most likely, this somewhat more favorable perception was in response to Saied’s actions in July 2021 more than changes to the economy itself relating to COVID-19. Initially, Saied’s closure of parliament was very popular, and Tunisians became far more hopeful about their economic future. Meanwhile, in Lebanon, ratings fell from 14 percent saying the economy was good in 2018 to less than 1 percent in 2022. This outcome may reflect the challenges from COVID-19 but also reflects the financial collapse of the country in the fall of 2019, when the currency lost upward of 90 percent of its value.

To evaluate the perceived effects of COVID-19, Arab Barometer asked citizens what they believed was the biggest challenge to emerge out of the pandemic. In most countries surveyed, the plurality of citizens named the rising cost of living. In Egypt (40 percent), Tunisia (35 percent), and Mauritania (33 percent), at least one in three held this view. In the vast majority of countries, nearly a quarter or more did.

At the same time, it appears that citizens were more likely to feel the impacts of rising costs than a complete lack of basic goods. In all countries surveyed, fewer than one in five said that the biggest challenge resulting from COVID-19 was a decreased availability of necessities. In most countries, fewer than one in ten held this view.

The effect of rising costs was made clear by the challenges citizens had affording basic necessities. In nine of the twelve countries surveyed, at least half of respondents said it was often or sometimes true over the past year that they worried that their supply of food would run out before they had money to buy more. In fact, at least two-thirds reported this happening in the past year in Egypt, Libya, Mauritania, and Sudan.

When asked if they had actually run out of food in the past year, in half of the countries surveyed a majority said yes. In Egypt, Mauritania, and Sudan, more than six in ten said they had run out of food in the last twelve months. For the most part, this wave of surveys was completed before Russia invaded Ukraine, meaning that the ensuing rise in inflation and global shortages had not yet been felt by publics. In other words, in most countries surveyed, this was the picture of food security in MENA that was emerging after the breakout of COVID-19 but before subsequent global events made the situation worse.

Despite these challenges, few in the region reported receiving help to mitigate the situation. In ten of eleven countries where the question was asked, at least three-quarters said they did not receive any kind of relief aid during the pandemic. The key exception was Morocco, where only about half (53 percent) reported receiving no assistance. In Morocco, the key source of assistance was in fact the government, with 61 percent of those who received help saying it came from the national government. In half of the other countries as well, the national government was listed as being the primary source of assistance. However, given the relatively small percentage that received assistance, it is clear that in most countries, many if not the majority of those in need did not receive the financial assistance that they needed to help weather the pandemic.

Yet, the results also suggest that citizens did not believe that all citizens in their country were affected equally. In part, this stems from broad concerns about the wealth gap that is observed across the region. In all twelve countries surveyed, clear majorities said that the gap between the rich and the poor was problematic to a great or medium extent. In half of the countries surveyed, at least three-quarters held this view, including 92 percent in Jordan and 87 percent in Egypt. Moreover, in six of ten countries where the question was asked, at least half said that compared with twelve months prior, the wealth gap had widened (see figure 1). This sentiment was particularly prevalent in Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon, where about three-quarters or more said it was increasing. In three of the remaining countries, almost half (between 44 percent and 47 percent) said the wealth gap was increasing. Mauritania was the singular surveyed country where only a minority of citizens (32 percent) said the wealth gap had increased.

Overall, these results paint a troubling economic picture across the region. Although not all of these outcomes can be linked directly with the coronavirus pandemic, it is clear that citizens perceived their fortunes to be declining during this period. Although not a majority, a sizeable percentage of citizens said that the primary challenge from the pandemic was not health-related but instead an effect on their personal economic outcomes. As people go hungry in many countries that are formally considered middle income, the toll of the last few years becomes clear. Whether governments have the will or capacity to meaningfully address these challenges remains to be seen. However, for the most part, they have not done so effectively over the previous decade. As COVID-19 exacerbates long-standing challenges facing the region, governments will be forced to find solutions under even more difficult circumstances. If they do not, then it is likely views of government will decline even further due, at least in part, to the long-lasting effects from the pandemic.

Changes to Basic Rights

Globally, the COVID-19 pandemic led to a number of restrictions on basic activities in the name of public health, particularly freedom of movement or assembly. In many countries, governments enforced strict lockdowns to try to limit or slow the spread of the virus, in part to help hospitals cope with the caseload. However, some governments took additional steps, including limiting freedom of speech or of the press, ostensibly to prevent the spread of unsubstantiated rumors or false information about COVID-19. In fact, the public emergency measures were often used as a means of limiting criticism of the government and its actions during the pandemic.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, citizens across the MENA region were divided on the degree to which they felt their basic rights were guaranteed after the pandemic. In nine of the twelve countries surveyed, at most about half said that the freedom to express opinions was guaranteed to a great or medium extent (see figure 2). This level ranged from 51 percent in Lebanon and Algeria to just 31 percent in Palestine. The key exceptions were Kuwait (74 percent), Tunisia (72 percent), and Morocco (60 percent), where a clear majority believed this right was guaranteed, at least to a medium extent.

Although relatively few felt that the basic right to freedom of expression was guaranteed, the trends in most countries actually suggest that citizens felt they had greater freedom of speech in 2021 and 2022 than they did before the pandemic. In Libya, Sudan, Kuwait, and Morocco, citizens were more than ten points more likely to say that this basic freedom was guaranteed in 2021–2022, at least to a medium extent, than they were in 2018–2019 just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. There were also increases of 7 points in Lebanon and 6 points in Tunisia on this measure. To some extent, these changes may not be entirely linked with COVID-19; for example, the rise in Sudan may be due to the increased liberties gained from the protest movement that began in late 2019. However, it is notable that even in cases like Morocco and Lebanon, which did not experience similar changes, there was a perceived increase, suggesting that perhaps citizens felt that as restrictions on their basic rights were lifted more generally, their rights seemed more guaranteed than they did before the pandemic.

However, this trend does not hold up in all countries. In Jordan in 2022, citizens were 18 points less likely to say their right to freedom of expression was guaranteed than they were before the pandemic, while Palestine exhibited a 9-point decrease. Notably, Jordan instituted one of the world’s strictest lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic in the name of stopping the virus from entering the country. However, at the time of the survey, it did not appear that citizens believed all of their rights to freedom of speech had fully recovered since the pandemic started. In Palestine, the decrease in citizens’ saying their freedom of expression was protected may be tied less to the pandemic and more to some of the changing perceptions of basic rights associated with governments in the West Bank and in Gaza, as well as increasing tensions and greater restrictions as a result of the Israeli occupation.

Restrictions on mass gatherings are more in line with measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 according to public health experts. Across the MENA region, perceptions about the extent to which freedom of assembly was protected was lower than for freedom of speech. A clear majority said they enjoyed freedom of assembly in just one of the eleven countries where this question was asked. In most countries surveyed, about four in ten or less said the right to demonstrate peacefully was guaranteed to a great or medium extent, including just 27 percent in Palestine, 25 percent in Jordan, and 12 percent in Egypt. The key exception was Tunisia, the country that has been most democratic since 2011 in the region, where 61 percent of citizens still said this right was guaranteed.

However, a similar trend emerges when examining changes over time, with a widespread perception that the right to demonstrate peacefully was more guaranteed in 2021 and 2022 than it was before the pandemic. In countries for which trend data are available, there have been increases in six countries, including by 20 points in Sudan, 13 points in Tunisia, 12 points in Libya, and 10 points in Lebanon, since shortly before the pandemic struck. Although in some cases, like Sudan, this most likely represents a meaningful change in the legal rights enjoyed by citizens, elsewhere this may reflect the sense that restrictions on people gathering had been lifted since the early days of the pandemic. Even if there has been no meaningful improvement since the 2018–2019 period in most countries, the comparison to a time when all gatherings were formally restricted in many countries may result in citizens saying that their basic rights are more guaranteed than before the pandemic.

Again, the two key exceptions to this trend are Jordan (-18 points) and Palestine (-12 points). As with perceptions about freedom of expression, these changes are most likely a result of the stringent restriction of movement in Jordan at the beginning of the pandemic and a sense that these rights have not since been restored. In Palestine, movement of people is often restricted by Palestinian authorities or the Israeli occupation, so these numbers may again reflect this reality.

The issue of basic rights, particularly restrictions on essential freedoms, takes on a renewed importance in societies where these rights have often been restricted. Although limiting rights in the name of protecting public health may have been important, there remains a question of whether publics across the region are willing to accept such restrictions. Results from Arab Barometer make clear that publics are mostly accepting of such restrictions under certain circumstances, but very few are willing to give their governments carte blanche approval to restrict them any time there is a public emergency. For example, only in Mauritania did more than one in five citizens say the government should always be able to limit freedom of speech during a public emergency (see figure 3). In Egypt (9 percent), Palestine (7 percent), and Lebanon (4 percent), fewer than one in ten held this view.

However, the pandemic has likely influenced how citizens feel about this issue. In many cases, citizens said that it is sometimes justified to restrict freedom of speech during public emergencies. This perception was highest in Kuwait (55 percent), followed by Algeria (52 percent) and Libya (48 percent). However, only about a third of respondents in Lebanon (36 percent), Egypt (36 percent), Sudan (34 percent), and Iraq (33 percent) felt the same. Notably, Egypt, Sudan, and Iraq were all countries that experienced long periods during which state of emergency laws were implemented, suggesting these historical legacies may account for a greater reluctance to cede basic rights even in times of crisis.

However, in most countries, pluralities if not outright majorities said that it is never acceptable to limit freedom of speech during times of emergency. In four cases—Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Sudan—at least half said these rights should never be compromised. In the remining eight countries, between four in ten (Morocco) and about three in ten (Kuwait) said the same.

However, there was a somewhat greater willingness to accept restrictions on the media during times of crisis. In seven of the twelve countries surveyed, between a fifth and a third of citizens said it was always justifiable to censor the media during a public emergency. Only in Egypt and Palestine did fewer than 15 percent hold this view. In most countries, a plurality said that it was sometimes justifiable to censor the media during a time of crisis. In most countries surveyed, this ranged between 40 and 50 percent, although the percentage was only about a third in Iraq (36 percent), Mauritania (35 percent), and Sudan (31 percent).

Meanwhile, in eight of twelve countries, a third or fewer said it was never justifiable to censor the media during a time of emergency. This belief was lowest in Algeria (24 percent) and Kuwait (23 percent). However, in Sudan (46 percent), Palestine (45 percent), and Iraq (41 percent), pluralities said that this action was never justified during a time of emergency.

These findings highlight shifting views on the issues of basic rights across the region. As before the pandemic, in most countries, minorities said that these rights were guaranteed, but the pandemic may have shifted expectations. In most countries surveyed, citizens were more likely to say they enjoyed basic rights than shortly before the onset of COVID-19. As restrictions have been lifted, citizens may feel that rights have improved, even if this is not an actual change from the pre-pandemic period. However, citizens were largely unwilling to say their governments should be able to curtail these rights during any public emergency. Although many were willing to accept this under at least some circumstances, this was not universally held, and citizens demonstrated that they prefer their governments to tackle these challenges while still guaranteeing their civil rights.

Gender

Evidence from around the world suggests that COVID-19 affected not only relationships between citizens and their governments but also within the family unit. Many of these changes have had a disproportionate impact on women. Globally, women appear more likely to have suffered job losses resulting from the pandemic compared to men. However, there may be some positive changes well, particularly related to perceptions of gender roles. Namely, as lockdowns brought men and women into closer contact within the home environment, perceptions of women’s roles appear to have changed.

Results from Arab Barometer suggest that in most countries citizens are now more likely to say women should have equal say within the home than they did before the pandemic. However, this does not mean women are viewed equally. When asked if a man should have the final say in all decisions concerning the family, about half or more agreed in nine out of twelve countries surveyed (see figure 4). The perception that men should be given the final say was most prevalent in Algeria and Iraq (65 percent). In contrast, fewer than half said men should have the final say in the household in Tunisia (43 percent), Palestine (42 percent), and Lebanon (34 percent).

Changes over time do suggest that support for women’s equality within a household did improve during the period of the pandemic. In six countries, the percentage of citizens who said a man should have final say within the household declined significantly from 2018–2019 to 2021–2022. The most notable declines in this view were found in Lebanon (-16 points), Sudan (-13 points), Kuwait (-13 points), and Tunisia (-11 points), while meaningful declines also occurred in Palestine (-9 points), Algeria (-6 points), and Iraq (-5 points). Meanwhile, in Libya and Jordan, there was no discernable trend, while in Morocco there was a 6-point increase. In other words, with a single exception, views of women’s role within the household have either been unchanged or, in the majority of cases, have shifted toward equality during the course of the pandemic.

Support for women’s equality by a second measure also increased during the period of the pandemic. In this case, the shift was in the views of women’s role in the public sphere. The degree to which this change was directly linked with the pandemic is not fully clear, although it is possible that higher views of women within the home may translate into greater support for women’s equality in the public sphere. In large part, this may be due to the relatively strong link between support for greater equality for women in the private sphere and in the public sphere. Evidence from the United States has demonstrated this linkage, as has other research. Although support for women’s equality in the public sphere lags that in the private sphere, it appears that the changes in views of women within the home during the coronavirus pandemic may have spilled over into views of women in the public sphere.

To evaluate this possibility, Arab Barometer included a question about whether men make better political leaders than women. By this measure as well, views of women are trending toward greater equality. Nevertheless, most citizens in the region still believed that women were not equal to men as political leaders (see figure 5). In eight of twelve countries surveyed, about two-thirds or more affirmed that men were better at political leadership. This perception was particularly strong in Algeria (76 percent) and Sudan (71 percent). Only in Morocco (49 percent), Tunisia (40 percent), and Lebanon (36 percent) did half or fewer agree with this view.

Similarly, in six countries, views of women’s equality in the political sphere increased during this period. This was especially true in Tunisia, where citizens were 16 points less likely to say men were better at political leadership than they were before the pandemic. Some of this change may be due to the appointment of Tunisia’s first female prime minister shortly before the survey, but the fact that the trend extends to additional countries suggests a broader pattern. Other meaningful changes were observed in Lebanon (-14 points), Sudan (-11 points), Kuwait (-9 points), Jordan (-9 points), and Palestine (-5 points). In Iraq, the trend was effectively unchanged taking into account the margin of error, while in Morocco (+14 points) and Algeria (+4 points), the trend moved in the opposite direction away from women’s equality.

These results demonstrate that COVID-19 likely had effects on social relations as well. In most countries in the MENA region, views of women’s roles in society had been relatively stable over much of the previous decade. This shift across numerous countries could be the result of other factors, and the magnitude of change within each country likely relates to country-specific conditions; however, the broader shift toward women’s equality across the region is most likely related to changes from the pandemic. This result is particularly noteworthy, suggesting that views toward women in both public and private spheres are linked, meaning changes that ensued from COVID-19 have likely benefited women’s equality beyond the home.

Conclusion

These results from Arab Barometer make clear that in addition to the known changes that have taken place in health and economic outcomes, among others, MENA publics are also changed. COVID-19 has exacerbated many long-standing challenges that governments in the region must address, particularly on the economic front. Although citizens do not appear to be much more likely to blame their governments coming out of this pandemic, if these broader issues cannot be solved in the years ahead, this is likely to change.

The survey also makes clear that citizens are worried about their basic civil rights, with relatively few saying these are guaranteed. Despite perceptions that citizens’ rights are more assured than they were shortly before COVID-19, there are reasons to believe that this effect may be temporary. Citizens are mostly unwilling to cede their basic rights during any event the government deems to be an emergency, indicating a broader desire for these rights to be respected.

Finally, in terms of everyday social interactions, the results strongly suggest that COVID-19 has changed how citizens think about women’s rights. This finding accords with evidence from other regions around the globe, suggesting a broader trend. It is possible that this will not hold over time and that old patterns will reemerge, but for now it suggests that women have mad