Breaking The Bottlenecks of Syria’s Reconstruction (Part 1)
Fourteen constriants standing between Syria's recovery and its delivery.
Executive Summary
Following 2011, Syria spent over a decade being torn apart. Torn apart physically and torn apart figuratively. The economic devastation wrought by the civil war was itself preceded by decades of a corrosive political economy that saw the institutions as well as the soft and physical infrastructure required for a sustainable nation state to never be consolidated or even built in the first place. The product of this is a Syria that, economically, is on its knees.
A civil war like Syria’s rips a country apart in far more ways than just devastated buildings and crippled industries. But rebuilding, or building, legitimate institutions of governance and order, soft and hard infrastructure, and systems that enable individuals to advance their livelihoods required for an economic reconstruction rebuilds far more than an economy. A successful, sustainable and comprehensive economic reconstruction addresses, whether directly or through second- or third-order effects, many of the social cleavages caused by an era of conflict like that Syria suffered. The operative word there is comprehensive. Reconstructions that benefit a minority while others are left in the cold are not rebuilding anything except a path back into conflict.
Building a roadmap for such a comprehensive reconstruction is the objective of this essay series. The roadmap will unfold over three parts, each presenting the key bottlenecks that are preventing Syria from achieving such a reconstruction and proposing how to overcome these bottlenecks. The entire series is deliberately geared to be of real utility to wide range of stakeholders engaged in/with Syria aside from the government alone. Foreign envoys and embassies designing their engagement strategies, INGOs and development agencies devising their programmatic strategies, public and private investors and financiers looking to ascertain the ecosystem risks surrounding their prospective projects and thus what best practices they should demand as terms of their engagement – all of these stakeholders and more will be able to lean on this series as they chart their path ahead in Syria.
This part, Part 1 (“Pillar I: Institutional Foundations of the State”), is the most important pillar of the roadmap, as its bottlenecks must be addressed first to enable addressing those of Pillars II and III. Pillar I lays out the platform of governance – spanning normative and procedural imperatives – yet to be established in Syria that is the essential substrate for any reconstruction to emerge from and sustain. Six bottlenecks and their solutions are examined:
1) A published national vision
2) A bureaucracy designed to serve the public
3) Robust transparency
4) Separation of powers, in transition and after
5) Technical roles and technical people
6) Clear government communication and information environment
Part 2 (“Pillar II: Economic Enablers – Regulation, Market Structure, and Infrastructure”) will lay out the key systems that must be built off the foundation of Pillar I to enable the resources required for the reconstruction to flow and be protected. If Pillar I is the central nervous system and immune system of the reconstruction, Pillar II is the circulatory system – the arteries and veins. Five bottlenecks, and how to overcome them, constitute the analysis of this pillar:
7) A functional banking system
8) Electricity capacity
9) Property rights and contract enforcement
10) Physical and soft trade and customs infrastructure
11) An empowered Syrian private sector
Part 3 (“Pillar III: Growth That Reaches – Human Capital, Jobs, and Local Government”) concerns how to empower Syrians with agency, and thus to be the agents the reconstruction needs – not only in terms of individual skills and value creation opportunities, but also having the authority for the crucial local-level problem solving required. If Pillar I is the central nervous system and immune system, and Pillar II is the circulatory system, Pillar III is the reproductive system – the ability of the organism to sustain life. Three bottlenecks, and the paths to overcoming them, will be examined here:
12) Rebuilt education system and skilled workforce
13) Job creation
14) Calibrated responsibilities between municipalities, governorates, and the central state
Part 3 will end with a proposal for the creation of a small body, a “Delivery Unit”, to coordinate and guide the reconstruction’s administration on a macro level and conduct the iterative problem-solving and reflective accountability mechanisms ongoing to ensure its path remains correct.
If there is a unifying perspective throughout the series, it is urgency. Commendable gains have undoubtably been made by the government, particularly in the relationship building required for the partnerships that will be crucial to Syria’s reconstruction. But the challenge is now the domestic front and the far harder but far more critical work of compromise, sharing, and systems building, work that often doesn’t provide instant payoffs like a headline-grabbing sanctions removal announcement, but work that provides the foundation for a Syria that moves away from conflict, not towards it. Without being alarmist, time is not on Syria’s side – the foundations for addressing the root causes of the highly visible fractures in the country, building the trust between communities and between people and government required to prevent those fractures deepening into true cleavages, are yet to be laid. The 24-month timeframe of the programme – unlocking certain bottlenecks and establishing significant tangible momentum across the others – is thus by no means arbitrary, but essential. Yet the wager underlying this series is a positive one. Once these bottlenecks are addressed, Syria is positioned to reclaim its role as the political, economic, and financial centre of the Levant, and to convert a decade of destruction into a generation of construction. This is one of the largest reconstruction and investment opportunities of this generation, and we are unequivocally bullish on what comes next.
Series Introduction
Eighteen months after the fall of the Assad regime, the central question facing Syria’s reconstruction has shifted. It is no longer whether recovery is possible. Sanctions relief, returning capital, and renewed multilateral engagement have largely settled that question. What remains uncertain is whether the institutional architecture exists to convert possibility into durable results.
The macro indicators point in a single direction. The United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom have each lifted their comprehensive sanctions regimes, and Executive Order 14312 in July 2025 removed Syria from what had been the broadest sanctions architecture in the world. The United Nations, for its part, has lifted sanctions on Hayyat Tahrir al-Sham, Jabhat al-Nusra, President Ahmed al-Sharaa, and Interior Minister Anas Khattab. The IMF returned to Damascus for the first time since 2009, and the World Bank approved its first Syria project in nearly four decades: a $146 million electricity grant followed by a $20 million public financial management programme. Saudi Arabia and Qatar, between them, cleared Syria’s outstanding $15.5 million in arrears to the Bank, and part-funded public-sector salaries through various three-month tranches in 2025. At the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in October 2025, President al-Sharaa reported that Syria had at that point from all countries received roughly $28 billion in investment pledges, with the 2025 total reportedly as high as $56 billion. The 2026 budget, estimated at $10.5 billion, is roughly three times its 2025 predecessor.
These figures, striking as they are, understate the achievement, because the most consequential work of the past year has been intangible. Sanctions relief and signed pledges are the visible output; the harder accomplishment sits upstream of them. In a year and a half, a government drawn from a wartime movement has rebuilt much of the country’s external relationships, bringing capitals that had treated Syria as untouchable back to the table and reopening the channels through which every development above became possible. Few post-conflict transitions have moved this quickly on the international political stage.
The progress is real, yet it remains incomplete. What stands between this momentum and durable recovery is a set of structural constraints embedded within the Syrian state and economy, each functioning as friction that compounds across nearly every process the recovery requires.
This essay serves as the primer for a SIMA Insights series. Building on the firm’s earlier analysis of Syria’s banking and financial reintegration (the constraint that gates seven of the others) the series will examine the bottlenecks running across the breadth of the Syrian economy. The fourteen constraints below are organized into three pillars: institutional foundations (1 to 6), economic enablers (7 to 11), and inclusive growth (12 to 14). The pillars matter because the constraints do not resolve in isolation – some unlock others, and the sequencing therefore forms a key part of the answer. Social cohesion, transitional justice, and post-conflict reconciliation carry their own weight, and belong in a separate frame.
The subsequent analysis holds relevance well beyond the Syrian ministries to which the reforms speak directly. Anyone weighing Syria has a stake in how these constraints are read: the investor sizing a first commitment, the operating company pricing execution risk, the development institution structuring a loan, the foreign envoy calibrating engagement, or the agencies and NGOs designing programmes around what the country really needs.
What follows comes from the lead author’s ten months on the ground in Damascus and the second author’s several field trips to the country in the transition period – watching the recovery advance on some fronts and stall on others, often in the same sector at the same time. The constraints below are the pattern beneath that unevenness.
Pillar I: Institutional Foundations of the State
The six constraints gathered in this pillar determine whether the solutions proposed for Pillars II and III can manifest successfully.
Each constraint is held in place by a logic that may appear rational to certain Syrian decision-makers yet proves a mirage when measured against the requirements of a durable reconstruction. Concentrating decisions within a small number of offices feels safer to those holding authority, since it reduces the risk of their agenda being diluted. But to external observers, the same concentration signals political fragility and institutional weakness. Opacity in contracting, where contracts have been given directly without a tender process, has been pursued to preserve control and flexibility for the government, saving the time and effort of dealing with potentially messy public processes. But to investors and partners, it reads instead as evidence that insiders have something to conceal.
The reform underlying each constraint amounts, fundamentally, to a single decision: to cease optimizing for short-term control at the expense of medium- and long-term durability. That is the pattern common to every post-conflict transition that has succeeded. Each reform, however, also redistributes something. Concentrated authority, opaque contracting, and discretionary licensing are sources of leverage for those who hold them, which means the actors best positioned to slow a reform are usually the ones it would constrain. The technical design of the fixes that follow is, in most cases, the straightforward part. The binding question is whether the leadership is prepared to expend political capital against incumbents who benefit from the present arrangement.
Bottleneck 1: A published national vision
Ask ten ministers what Syria should look like in 2036, and ten different answers follow. Ask citizens what specifically the government is building toward, and most will offer little more than a shrug.
Absent such a vision, ministries pursue divergent objectives: investments are approved without reference to national priority, education reform proceeds without alignment to the labour market, and citizens endure hardship without knowing to what end. Erhard’s Germany had Wohlstand für alle; Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore framed its ambition as “from third world to first in one generation”; Kagame’s Rwanda set middle-income status by 2035. Syria, as of yet, has no equivalent.
What is required is a concise Syria 2036 framework, with 2036 chosen not only due to its realistic timeline, but also because 2036 will mark the 90th anniversary of full Syrian independence in 1946. While Syrian independence had been declared in 1941, the French Mandate didn’t end until 1946 upon the departure of the final French soldier. The symbolism here is important: sovereignty that is realized, not just declared.
Syria 2036 should span three dimensions: daily life (electricity, water, schools, healthcare); economic identity (what the country will produce and export, the value it will create for its people and the region, and the investment it intends to attract); and institutional character (how authority will flow between the executive, the ministries, and local government). The objective is not a five-hundred-page development plan but a vision a citizen can absorb, a minister can plan against, and an investor can be drawn toward. Every subsequent budget decision, investment approval, and reform would then be tested against a single question: does this move Syria toward its 2036 vision, or away from it?
Responsible body: the Presidency, supported by the Ministry of Economy and Industry. Status quo: no published national vision; fragmentary sectoral five-year plans across individual ministries.
Bottleneck 2: A bureaucracy designed to serve the public
Currently, building permits take three months, import clearance requires three weeks, and business registration necessitates visits to multiple offices. Each step consumes time and money, and each creates an opening for informal payment. Prosperity in post-conflict Syria rests as much on legitimacy and rules-based governance as on physical reconstruction.
Georgia confronted the same problem in 2004. Under Kakha Bendukidze, the government assessed every license against a single test: does this protect the public, or protect an insider? As a result, the government eliminated roughly 90 percent of pre-existing licenses. Within a few years, Georgia climbed from the bottom third of the (now discontinued) World Bank’s Doing Business ranking into the global top ten, a position it has held since.
If it was applied to Syria’s twenty most-used government services a similar review to cut red tape could yield outcomes that citizen and investor alike could feel: business registration within one day, construction permits within two weeks, customs clearance within seventy-two hours. Each service in its remaining or new form would be published with a service-level agreement, provide a case-tracking number capacity for users, and each week would publish the average processing time on the dashboard discussed in the next section below.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Administrative Development, the Ministry of Economy & Industry, and the Customs Authority. Status quo: no published service-level agreements; no centralised case-tracking; processing times communicated case-by-case at the counter.
Bottleneck 3: Robust transparency
Among the constraints in this pillar, transparency is at once the least costly to address yet also one of the absolute most consequential.
The issue turns less on the accuracy of the government’s data than on the fact that, in a setting like transitional Syria, self-reported data does little to build third-party credibility. A government dashboard reporting improved electricity supply is structurally indistinguishable from a government press release reporting the same. The gap between the initial official announcement and the Finance Minister’s eventual revision does not represent a transparency success; it is a reminder that the system failed to catch the error before publication. Genuine transparency is a system that permits the engagement of the necessary actors and bodies to catch errors before they are published.
Four design choices distinguish such transparency from mere press releases or ministerial statements.
Budget and execution transparency: The Ministry of Finance, under Minister Mohammed Yisr Barnieh, has begun this work. The April 2026 Citizen’s Budget, a 52-page document presenting the 2026 budget in simplified form and accompanied by a public summary of 2025 performance, marks the first time a Syrian national budget has been written for the citizen rather than the bureaucracy. The logical next step is a series of ministry-by-ministry quarterly execution reports, allowing citizens to see not merely what was allocated but what was actually spent, with the underlying methodology co-published alongside the World Bank’s public financial management programme, UNDP, and the IMF Article IV technical team. It is methodology, ultimately, that separates disclosure from spin.
Contract transparency: All government contracts above $500,000 should be published with the contractor’s name, value, scope, and timeline, including those executed through the Syrian Sovereign Fund and the Syrian Development Fund, which presently sit under direct presidential oversight without mandatory financial reporting. This is the single most effective anti-corruption measure available, and it speaks directly to a problem that, in the absence of disclosure, fills with speculation. Syria’s information vacuum breeds assumption, repeated widely enough to shape perception regardless of the extent of their veracity. The point is not whether any given account is true, but that opacity guarantees their continued resurfacing. This foundation for widespread rumor corrodes confidence as potently as confirmed wrongdoing. The Syrian Sovereign Fund’s recently launched website is a step in the right direction. Sustained disclosure of the kind set out above, contract by contract, is what would convert that gesture into true credibility for those institutions.
Appointment transparency: Every ministerial, director-general, and senior technical announcement should open with its mandate and selection criteria stated at the outset, and close with publication of the successful candidate’s qualifications and the process that produced the selection. Closed appointment processes remain among the swiftest routes by which post-transition governments forfeit credibility.
Performance transparency: Each minister should carry five measurable targets, displayed on a public dashboard and updated monthly. Verification from the citizen’s side, for instance a reporting line that asks whether an announced reform has in fact reached the public, could convert dashboard figures into claims that can be independently checked. Rwanda’s imihigo system and Georgia’s public service halls offer working models for this.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Finance (budget and execution), the Syrian Sovereign Fund and Syrian Development Fund (contract transparency, currently under direct presidential oversight), and individual ministries (performance). Status quo: budget published in summary form; contract publication ad hoc; no formal appointment process disclosure; no unified performance dashboard.
Bottleneck 4: Separation of powers, in transition and after
An earlier framing of this constraint, the concentration of executive power, described a symptom rather than the constraint itself. The constraint is that Syria has not yet established an enforceable separation between executive, judicial, and presidential authority, nor published the mechanism by which that separation is to be constructed once the transitional period concludes.
The Constitutional Declaration of March 2025 concentrates substantial authority in the executive, a posture that is defensible during a transition in which rapid decision-making is necessary and parliamentary structures are still being rebuilt. The risk lies less in the transitional concentration itself than in the absence of a published, time-bound roadmap for what is to follow it.
For investors, this registers as a present uncertainty rather than a future risk. No specialized commercial chamber currently stands ring-fenced from executive influence, and the treaty protections available to foreign investors sit above most of what a firm actually encounters: they are available only to investors whose home state has a treaty in force with Syria, are valid only where the affected business qualifies as an investment rather than an ordinary trading transaction, and are feasible only for claims large enough to justify years of international proceedings. Furthermore, Syria’s foreign assets abroad are thin enough to make any such arbitration award hard to collect.
Syrian reform so far has gone around this issue rather than through it: the Syrian Investment Authority (SIA) is establishing its own arbitration center (which is inherently problematic seeing as it will be housed inside the same authority that grants the licences the centre would adjudicate on) months after the Federation of Syrian Chambers of Commerce launched a separate commercial one. But the arbitration these bodies would offer binds only those who agreed to arbitrate with each other. A foreign investor holding a concession in Syria could therefore hypothetically arbitrate against the ministry that signed the original contract with an arbitration clause, but that clause would be worthless against, for instance, the customs authority reassessing its imports, the governorate withholding a permit, or a license revoked under Decree 114. Even then, where the losing side in the arbitration does not comply, enforcement will still revert to the Syrian court system, which, as stated, is currently not protected from executive branch influence.
The reform can be sequenced in two stages. Immediately: paired commercial and administrative chambers within the existing court system, established by law rather than by decree so that their jurisdiction and their judges’ tenure cannot be withdrawn by the authority whose decisions they review, holding ring-fenced jurisdiction over commercial disputes and over challenges to government decisions affecting investors like, for instance, those examples provided above. Its judges should be selected by the Supreme Judicial Council (which, as it is yet to be finalized, should not be chaired by the executive once it is finalized) on nomination by the Bar Association, with fixed terms and removal only on published grounds, and with technical assistance from the World Bank Group and UNCTAD on drafting and training. This should be published along with an explicit timeline for ratifying bilateral investment treaties. During the permanent-constitution process (timing to be confirmed): a published mechanism setting out how the permanent framework will govern judicial appointments, tenure, removal, and the judiciary’s relationship with the presidency, the cabinet, and the legislature.
This two-stage judicial reform sits among the items the new Parliament’s preparatory committees are expected to address early. These committees are mandated to draft the Assembly’s rules of procedure and sequence the priority legislative files, the judicial framework among them. Publishing the two-stage mechanism even before Parliament convenes would establish a known process with defined milestones, beginning to ease the uncertainty that the governance gaps described above create for investors and reconstruction partners. The witness function and the treaty timeline are what distinguish this approach from another presidential decree. Without them, an additional decree would add little to governance, and little to trust.
Responsible bodies: the Presidency, the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Judicial Council, and the new Parliament. Status quo: Constitutional Declaration of March 2025 in effect; no specialized commercial chamber; judicial independence framework not yet defined for the post-transitional period.
Bottleneck 5: Technical roles and technical people
Leading a revolution and governing a state demand different capacity.
Partners, investors, and development institutions take note when a counterpart proves unable to evaluate a proposal or to render a decision that falls within their own authority. The withdrawal of confidence that follows ranks among the most damaging dynamics in post-conflict reconstruction, precisely because it operates quietly. The government rarely perceives it until the partnerships it requires are no longer within reach.
Despite a handful of high-profile agreements with Gulf states, early signs of such erosion are already discernible in the widening distance between announcement and execution. Most multi-billion-dollar MOUs have been signed but have not broken ground, and the headline pledge totals reported through 2025 stand well ahead of the capital drawn down and invested. Such gaps are, in part, a story about insufficient Syrian bureaucratic capacity to operationalize the pledges and plans.
The corrective is recruitment: fifty experienced diaspora Syrians placed in critical roles during Year 1 (from now), with a further fifty in Year 2, distributed across five clusters of ten: public financial management at the Ministry of Finance, investment promotion at the Syrian Investment Authority, energy regulation at the Ministry of Energy, bank supervision at the Central Bank of Syria, and health-system design at the Ministry of Health. The Year 1 ceiling reflects the realistic limits of outreach and security clearance rather than any want of ambition, and the five clusters correspond to the capacity gaps inflicting the greatest damage on the foundations the reconstruction depends upon.
The barriers diaspora professionals cite most frequently as the impediments to their return are five in number: foreign credentials that Syrian regulators decline to recognize (an institutional choice that gestures toward deeper questions of trust surrounding Western-trained returnees, and one the government could resolve by decree at near-zero cost); security and dual-nationality concerns held by the Syrian intelligence services towards diaspora individuals; salary gaps relative to Gulf or European positions; a shortage of international schools for their children; and concerns over general security and uncertainty at the direction of the state and society.
The architecture for establishing these clusters also comprises four elements. The first is published decision rights, placing on the record what enshrined decision-making ability each senior hire has before they accept the role. The second is direct reporting to the relevant minister, without an intervening layer of bureaucracy between the hire and the minister. The third is a six-month public KPI review, rendering any political interference with the hire’s mandate visible. The fourth is a guaranteed exit with full severance should those published protections be overridden more than twice within any twelve-month period, a clause that protects the returnee against the hollowing-out of their authority while placing the government’s own reputation at stake.
Responsible bodies: the Office of the Presidency, the five target ministries (Finance, Investment Authority, Energy, Central Bank of Syria, Health), and the General Intelligence Directorate (security clearance). Status quo: ad hoc senior diaspora hiring through 2025 with no published programme; no standardized mandate-protection framework; credential recognition handled case-by-case by sectoral regulators.
Bottleneck 6: Clear government communication and information environment
No single authoritative voice speaks for the Syrian government on economic policy. Ministers, state media, social media, and contacts within the ministries each convey something different, leaving investors to reconcile the conflicting signals themselves.
The problem extends beyond the government. Syria’s wider information environment carries substantial volumes of contested content disseminated by channels under external influence: networks aligned with foreign states, elements of the former regime now operating from abroad, and other regional factions – particularly, but not solely, Iran-aligned networks and Hezbollah-linked media. In the absence of a credible Syrian institution established as the trusted source, the field is ceded to whoever profits from the confusion.
The economic stakes are tangible. Sectarian flare-ups that circulate on social media without a credible factual response from the government can dent investor confidence. The effect surfaces in the terms of deals: Gulf financiers press for lower prices or cheaper land, and development finance institutions such as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation price their loans higher.
The reform has two components. On the government side: a single spokesperson briefing weekly in Arabic and English, one message track on reconstruction and reform priorities across the ministries with pre-agreed lines, and an investor-facing channel that answers specific deal-status questions within twenty-four hours. That office, briefing infrastructure included, would cost well under $2 million annually when benchmarked against comparable regional government communications offices. On the wider information side: an independent Syrian media council mandated to identify and rebut disinformation, fact-check incitement, and support independent Syrian journalism through training and small grants. A five-year programme would build the institutional infrastructure the country presently lacks.
The cost of forgoing this reform accrues in two places: in deals that fail to close because the investor’s counsel could not obtain a clear answer to a question that should have had one, and in incidents that escalate faster than they ought because no credible voice corrected or clarified them in the opening hours.
Responsible bodies: the Ministry of Information, the General Secretariat of the Presidency (cross-ministerial messaging), and the Syrian Investment Authority (investor-facing communication). Status quo: no single government spokesperson; messaging dispersed across ministers; no unified investor-relations channel; no functioning independent Syrian media council.