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Jordan also fell in the rankings of the highly respected Transparency International Corruptions Perceptions Index from 37 (1 being the least corrupt in about 180 countries studied) in 2003 to 50 in 2010. It is clear that Jordan's political establishment has no interest in implementing the king's explicit orders to move ahead on political reform and, in most cases, took measures that set the process back. The uprisings that Jordan is A Decade of Struggling Reform Efforts in Jordan: The Resilience of the Rentier System witnessing today are not all instigated by groups that are seeking reform in the traditional liberal sense. Some are led by groups that support the rentier-system model-the source of many of their livelihoods-and are concerned that the state may move away from such a system. The king's own policies on political reform-often aimed at striking a balance between the traditional elements and the reformers-have not borne fruit, and almost always resulted in appeasing traditional elements at the expense of reform. Reform needs reformers who are cognizant of the need for an orderly, gradual process but are also committed to a serious roadmap that would lead to true power-sharing through strong legislative and judicial bodies. The selection of several prime ministers did not lead to serious progress on reform, precisely because they were neither true believers in its value, nor did they have a critical mass of reformers inside their governments able to counterbalance the traditional elements who wanted to preserve the status quo at all costs. Thus, instead of holistically addressing all needed areas of reform, reform programs were instead reduced to ad- hoc initiatives that did not add up to any serious and structural changes in governance systems. The king's practice of handing a prime minister a plan for reform that the latter does not believe in and expecting him to deliver on it regardless has simply failed. The National Agenda, an example of such a holistic and gradual program to move toward a more inclusive and democratic system, was never
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