Propping up the State

During the civil war, when the residents of Lebanon would give directions, they could always rely on one landmark from which to guide visitors to their homes — the mountain of garbage that had built up in each neighborhood over the years of violence and absence of a functioning state. Today those mountains may be gone, but other remnants of those terrible years are still as pungent as the stench of rotting trash. After the war ended, Lebanon’s public institutions were literally in a shambles. “We used to go to general directors of ministries and they would say to us, ‘before you talk to me about computers there is the window that needs fixing because the employees are freezing’,” says Nasser Israoui, project manager of United Nations Development Program (UNDP) at the Office of the Minister of State for Administrative Reform (OMSAR).  Recognizing the dire need for reform, in 1992