Syria’s post-Assad transition has involved every sector of the state. While security sector reform and the establishment of new governance systems have been well-covered, less researched is the process of reforming and rebuilding the bureaucratic state. This process has involved merging parallel, but operationally unique, departments while also imposing a massive evaluation and downsizing of the regime’s state work force. This initially included a three-way merger of government structures from Idlib’s Syrian Salvation Government, the north Aleppo-based SNC, and the regime. Since January 2026 this has also involved merging the Syrian Democratic Forces’ administrative bodies in Syria’s northeast with the new Syrian government’s (itself a merger of the three aforementioned governments).
This complicated state-building process has been hampered my many challenges, to say the least. Among them was the regime’s own bureaucratic rot. By 2024, many regime institutes were nearly non-functioning due to corruption, theft, and ineptitude. Opposition state institutions suffered from a lack of manpower and no experience in administrating a state larger than one governorate.
The Ministry of Administrative Development (وزارة التنمية الإدارية) has played a central role in addressing these challenges. Specifically, the ministry’s governorate-level directorates are tasked with providing assessments and trainings for all other administrative offices within there governorates. I recently met with an official from one governorate’s Development Directorate to learn more about their role, training process, and challenges during the post-liberation state mergers.