Initiatives

Research infrastructure I founded and lead. Each one turns a line of public administration research into data, standards or a professional community that governments and researchers can use.

arablab.ai ↗
Founder and Principal Investigator

Arab AI Governance Lab

arablab.ai

A research laboratory on how the 22 member states of the Arab League govern artificial intelligence. It publishes an open dataset on national strategies, regulators, data protection, readiness, research output, infrastructure, human capital and cybersecurity; the Arab AI Governance Index, a comparative measure of regulatory maturity, readiness, digital government and cybersecurity; and the annual Arab AI Governance Report, which sets out the evidence, the gaps and the policy priorities for each state and for the region.

Why it matters for public administration and policy

For public administration, AI is a test of regulatory and administrative capacity. The lab asks whether administrations that adopt AI rules possess the expertise, data systems and coordination to apply them, and how algorithmic systems move discretion and accountability inside the state. For policy makers it offers a comparative evidence base for sequencing regulation and capability.

mena-evaluation.com ↗
Founder and Director

Arab Observatory for Policy Evaluation Institutionalization

mena-evaluation.com

The Observatory publishes the Index of Evaluation Institutionalization in the Arab Region, the first scored comparative measurement of how far public policy evaluation is institutionalised in the political, social and professional systems of 11 Arab League states, across 16 indicators. The first edition (2025) is accompanied by an annual report in English, French and Arabic, state profiles and an open data explorer. The index underpins The Institutionalization of Evaluation in the Middle East and North Africa and the articles in the American Journal of Evaluation and Evaluation Review.

Why it matters for public administration and policy

The index measures what institutional theory calls decoupling, the distance between formal evaluation mandates and organisational practice: legislation, units and standards on one side, professional capacity and use on the other. Governments and United Nations agencies have applied it as a benchmark for building national evaluation systems.

marsad-edara.org ↗
Founder and Principal Investigator

Administration Observatory in the Arab Region

marsad-edara.org

Citizens Voice: a survey of 1,861 residents of ten Arab League states on public services, resources and opportunities. Its flagship measure, the Arab Access and Experience Index, records for eleven domains of everyday life both access, what residents can obtain and use, and experience, how they rate what they obtain. The 2026 report, From Provision to Experience: A Public Administration Analysis of Access to Services, Resources and Opportunities in the Arab States, is published in English, French and Arabic, with its data and methods. Each state has a profile and a country brief, and an interactive explorer compares states and domains.

Why it matters for public administration and policy

The observatory reads service delivery from the citizen side: whether public provision becomes access that residents can use and value. In 74 of 110 country and domain scores, reported access exceeds experience, and the two domains closest to the administrative interface, service provision and civic participation, are among the weakest in the region. The distance between provision and experience locates the stage at which procedures, eligibility, information and responsiveness shape what citizens receive, and gives administrations a measure of delivery that coverage statistics do not capture.

evalsouth.org ↗
Founding President

Global South Evaluation Society

evalsouth.org

An association for evaluators, researchers and policy makers across Africa, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa, established in Doha in 2023, with five regional networks and chapter leads in more than forty countries. It convened the EvalSouth Conference in Doha in 2023 and the Global South Evaluation Research Conferences in 2022 and 2023, and is preparing the EvalSouth 2027 Global Conference in Doha.

Why it matters for public administration and policy

Professionalisation is one of the mechanisms through which administrative capacity is built. The society connects evaluators, public officials and researchers, supports evaluation methods grounded in Global South administrative realities, and carries research findings into government practice.