By Dr.Ahmad “Jordan” Al-Zu'Bi
Jordan Daily - Jordan promises its young people a modern economy. But can it build tomorrow while opportunity at the top keeps circulating through familiar circles?
Imagine a fictional Jordanian public figure. Today he is a minister. Tomorrow he chairs an authority. A few years later, he sits on the board of an institution in an entirely different field. Soon he is advising on another sector, appearing on television as an expert on another crisis, perhaps eventually returning to government.
The character is fictional. The institutional question is not: how does expertise become so portable?
Jordan has no shortage of young people. It may have a shortage of institutional willingness to entrust them with consequential authority. That distinction matters. Around 62% of Jordan's population is under 30. Jordan's Economic Modernization Vision, meanwhile, identifies absorbing more than one million young Jordanians into the labor market over the coming decade as a major national challenge. Jordan is therefore confronting an unusual economic contradiction: one of the country's largest reservoirs of human capital is also among its most underutilized.
This is usually discussed as a labor-market problem. It is also a governance problem.
Jordan Does Not Have a Youth Problem. It Has a Youth-Allocation Problem.
The Economic Modernization Vision is called Unleashing Potential to Build the Future. But human capital cannot be unleashed only at the bottom of an economy. Modernization also requires renewal at the top.
That raises an uncomfortable question: can a country modernize its economy faster than it modernizes the way it identifies, tests and renews its decision-makers? Asking a new generation to build a new economy while repeatedly drawing senior decision-makers from familiar circles creates an institutional contradiction.
When Public Office Becomes a Circular Economy
Jordan has developed something resembling a circular economy of public office. A minister leaves one portfolio and later appears in another. A senior official moves elsewhere in the public architecture. Another returns after several years. Governments change, responsibilities change and institutions change, yet familiar names frequently reappear.
Prime Minister Jafar Hassan’s own distinguished record of public service illustrates both the value of experience and the deeper question this article raises. He served as planning minister across six successive government formations between 2009 and 2013, later as deputy prime minister and minister of state for economic affairs, and twice as director of the King’s Office before becoming prime minister in 2024. That record itself helps explain why experience is repeatedly valued: institutions know what they are getting. The question, then, is not whether experienced officials deserve to serve again. It is whether a system remarkably effective at rediscovering proven officials is equally effective at discovering exceptional people it has never appointed before.
When Being Important Becomes a Qualification for Everything
Here, risk economics offers an explanation. Governments dislike appointment risk. The established official appears safer than the unknown 32-year-old engineer, 35-year-old economist, technology specialist or entrepreneur. The familiar candidate has been vetted, the bureaucracy knows them and their networks already exist. Call this familiarity insurance.
But familiarity can produce another phenomenon: the portability of elite status. Once somebody acquires sufficient standing within the senior establishment, previous status can begin functioning as a signal of competence across increasingly different domains. The question gradually changes from, “Who possesses the capabilities this institution needs?” to, “Who do we already know who has successfully occupied important positions?”
In a specialized economy, expertise should travel carefully. Status seems to travel much faster. And if government repeatedly draws leaders from overlapping professional and institutional circles, it also creates concentration risk: similar networks, similar information, similar assumptions and potentially similar blind spots. Banks understand concentration risk. Insurers understand correlated exposures. Governments should too.
From Recycling Positions to Recycling Opportunity
This suggests that تدوير المناصب may be only the visible part of a deeper phenomenon. The first layer is recycling positions: familiar individuals move through senior offices. The second is elite circulation: individuals may change, but access remains concentrated within familiar professional and social circles. The third is more consequential: recycling opportunity, تدوير الفرص. Access itself begins reproducing.
That can extend across generations. A parent who spends decades near power naturally accumulates relationships, information, reputation and institutional knowledge. Their children may be exceptionally qualified and should never be penalized for their surname. But they may also begin adulthood possessing something an equally talented outsider does not: inherited network capital.
The problem is not that the children of officials receive opportunities. They should be free to compete for them. The question is whether the unknown Jordanian gets the same door. When an office-holder finally leaves, does the opportunity leave with him, or does access simply pass to another familiar name, network or generation?
A Reshuffle Can Move Chairs Without Opening Doors
The August 2026 cabinet amendment offers a revealing illustration. Three serving ministers received changed or elevated responsibilities, while no new minister entered Cabinet. The government itself explained the limited reshuffle as part of a deliberate preference for accumulated experience, stability and continuity rather than continuous replacement. That rationale deserves to be taken seriously. Institutional memory has value.
But this is not a phenomenon invented by one prime minister or one government. Jordan’s public record contains many examples of senior figures serving across different governments, portfolios and institutions. The larger question is therefore not who moved where in one reshuffle. It is what happens over time when continuity repeatedly wins the argument while another generation waits outside the room. At what point does institutional memory become institutional repetition? A reshuffle changes chairs; renewal changes the opportunity set.
The Crown Prince Has Already Defined the Test
Perhaps the strongest argument for opening that opportunity set comes from the Crown Prince himself. Crown Prince Al Hussein bin Abdullah II has said that while young people bear responsibility for their futures, their right to empowerment is a responsibility shared by all sectors, “foremost of which is the public sector.” More importantly, he called on Jordan to rethink wasted capabilities and “put the right talent in the right place.”
That should become an economic principle of public administration: not the oldest talent, not automatically the youngest, not the most familiar or the best connected, but the right talent. Youth empowerment should never become an age quota. A 30-year-old is not inherently more capable than a 60-year-old. But having occupied public office before cannot itself become evidence that someone remains the best available person to occupy it again.
Stop Asking Who Has Served. Start Asking What Jordan Needs.
A modern appointment system should widen the national talent pool. For selected senior positions, Jordan could publish competency profiles, open nomination channels, search for exceptional expertise at home and abroad, use independent technical assessment and evaluate performance afterwards.
The pool should include former ministers and experienced senior officials, but also the Jordanian AI researcher abroad, the insurance economist working internationally, the energy specialist in the Gulf, the water engineer in Aqaba, the entrepreneur in Irbid and the brilliant civil servant in Tafileh whom nobody at the Fourth Circle happens to know.
The principle is neither “replace the old” nor “promote the young.” Jordan should preserve experienced hands while deliberately opening meaningful chairs for qualified new ones. And that raises perhaps the most uncomfortable economic question in this entire debate: if Jordan believes competition improves banking, telecommunications, insurance, investment and entrepreneurship, why should competition matter less in the market for public leadership?
Mr Prime Minister, Make the Circle Bigger
The Economic Modernization Vision is attempting to position Jordan for a different economic century. Its ambition to absorb more than one million young Jordanians into the labor market cannot stop at employment. Some of that generation must eventually design institutions, regulate new technologies, manage national risks and sit in the rooms where consequential decisions are made.
This is not an argument against experience. Jordan needs its experienced officials, and institutional memory is an asset worth preserving. But experience should not become exclusivity disguised as experience. Every government should also create meaningful room for a new generation of qualified Jordanians to serve alongside those who already know the system, bringing new knowledge into government while acquiring the institutional experience they will one day be expected to possess. A country cannot demand experience from a generation to which it never gives the opportunity to acquire it.
Jordan does not need to choose between yesterday’s experience and tomorrow’s talent. It needs them in the same room. The real measure of renewal is whether every government leaves enough doors open for exceptional new people to enter, learn, contribute and eventually become the experienced hands Jordan will need next.
