Politics in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is an amalgamation of formal-legal institutions and informal rules built on a highly personalist structure of power relations known as neopatrimonialism. Though the periphery is central to this type of personalist governance, the subnational dimension of neopatrimonialism was vastly neglected in past research. Since both our understanding of autocracy and neopatrimonialism build upon the notion of power-centralization in the hands of the ruler and the central regime, the state-centeredness of most research on the MENA region is reasonable. In light of the revival of decentralization efforts and discourses following the Arab uprisings of 2010/11, however, we argue that a thorough analysis of the relationship between local governance reforms and neopatrimonialism is key to advancing our understanding of governance and policy formulation in the MENA region. Though mostly not considered to be part of high politics, decentralization reforms have a significant impact on patron-client relations between the central level and the subna-tional territories of the body politic (Cammack et al. 2007; Demmelhuber et al. 2020). A systematic analysis of central and subnational elite dynamics is thus essential to broaden our understanding of decentralization under neopatrimonialism. Patron-client networks are asymmetric power relations with a clear dominance of the ruler as "prime patron", yet he is also dependent on the compliance and the successful management of his clien-telist networks. We argue that the country-specific interplay of central and subnational elite networks has an impact on the de jure formulation and the de facto outcome of decentralization processes, and vice versa. The purpose of this contribution is to examine which role neopatrimo-nialism and elite dynamics play in shaping the process and outcome of decentralization , with a focus on the post-2011 developments in four MENA countries (Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, and Egypt). A core element of neopatrimonialism is a well-balanced interplay of both formal and informal institutions. Neither the idealistic absence of the informal (legalistic-bureaucratic) rule, nor the complete dominance of informal politics (patri-4. 59 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748920731-59, am 05.04.2022, 03:15:31 Open Access-http://www.nomos-elibrary.de/agb