In Morocco, “global participatory turn” and decentralization measures has been widely promoted by international donors. In the late 1980’s, the World bank and the International Monetary fund’s structural adjustment plan was conditioned to major institutional reshuffling and “good governance” policies. But remodeling official norms has not been the only policy transfer at stake. Grey literature and scientific researches began to question the gap between official and practical norms: many of them concluded that culture was an important factor that influences policy transfer failure. Thus, in the 2000’s, international NGOs began to enhance institutions and practices, understand neighborhood leaderships and social norms. At this time, “community driven development” became a key word for a lot of development programs. However, some of those programs have also - more quietly - targeted local social norms and designed policy tools and procedures responding to international governance standards. Vulnerable social categories such as young people and women had to be empowered. In other words, local “culture” had to be understood and further on, shaped.
This paper, based on a fieldwork led in Salé between 2015 and 2018, tries to enlighten the influence of NGOs in a city known for being the poor “dormitory town” of Rabat. For the last decade, local social norms and those promoted by the NGOs has been intertwined. In certain neighbourhoods, where participatory urban planning was implemented, a new associative elite appeared. Public policy procedures and participatory schemes contributed to an ongoing cultural transformation through the targeting of social norms and more specifically the decision-making “culture”.