But, as thousands of Saudi women celebrated the weekend's threshold moment by taking the wheel, the manner of the change remained strictly authoritarian. While the regime has allowed women to drive, it has simultaneously arrested at least 19 of the women who had most vocally advocated for the change. According to Bubalo, the kingdom's ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, "is saying, 'I realise the system is broken and I'm going to change it, but I will do it myself and everyone must stay in line'. He's worried that once he's started the reform process, he'll lose control". Loading But does it really matter whether it's top-down change as opposed to bottom-up, so long as it's the change that's needed? Absolutely. Says Bubalo, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute: "No one person can transform a society. You need a constituency to take change forward. You are putting in jail the people who should be your allies." While there are physical barriers to women's rights, such as the driving ban, the cultural barriers to women's participation are far bigger. There remains the powerful social expectation that women, even if they have university degrees and drivers' licences, will stay home, start a family, tend to the menfolk's needs.

"You have to empower the forces in society that, even before Mohammed bin Salman, were pushing for reform," says Bubalo, also a principal at Nous, a public policy consultancy, and former Australian diplomat. "Unless you mobilise people, unless big parts of the society are pushing them forwards, nothing will happen." Growing female participation is one of the important "green shoots" that Bubalo sees as source of hope and change in the Middle East, the subject of his recent Lowy Institute paper, Remaking the Middle East, published by Penguin. Saudi women learn to drive during training sponsored by Ford Motor, in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia. Credit:AP Is he the ultimate optimist, to look at the smoking ruins of the Middle East, its democratic uprisings crushed by dictators, its people killed by the hundreds of thousands in apparently unending civil wars in Syria and Yemen, and see green shoots? "What we are seeing on our TV screens are symptoms of a system across the region that's decaying, and in some cases collapsing," says Bubalo. "It's important, but it's not the full picture. Some good things are happening that don't get as much media attention. It's not about pessimism or optimism - it's about getting the full picture.

"One of the key reasons I think there's some chance that some of these green shoots will develop is precisely because the old system is decaying." He sees five types of green shoots. First is women. Beyond Saudi Arabia, women are rising. Even though the uprisings of the Arab Spring were crushed in every country bar Tunisia, these hopeful reform movements nonetheless showed women in a new light and inspired the hopes of a new generation, hopes that live on: "Women took the opportunity - and not women activists but activists who happened to be women, a subtle but very important difference. In Yemen women were the face of the uprising. In Morocco and Egypt, women were prominent in leadership and as spokespeople." The Middle East saw women differently after the Arab Spring protests. Credit:AP Second is the increase in so-called "slow journalism", investigative and longer-form reporting, overwhelmingly coming from new start-up websites. "They're small and nimble and can dodge the crackdowns," says Bubalo. "They can break stories that can go into the mainstream. They're typically non-profit and training new journalists." He cites Inkyfada as an example. Third is the rise of what Bubalo calls "uncivil society" - civil society groups that have adopted uncivil methods to agitate for change. "They want to change the system, and not just the people at the top of the system."

Fourth is the upsurge in start-up firms and social entrepreneurship. "A traditional problem of the Middle East is everyone waiting around for the government to give them a job. The start-ups say, 'we're not waiting for the government'. Successful start-ups like Souk.com, he says, are also important in chipping away at an economic structure that has supported the old regimes. Fifth is an increasingly "impious politics" which will, he predicts, make Middle Eastern societies more tolerant. So the grim Arab Winter that followed the hopeful Arab Spring is not a permanent freeze, in Bubalo's reckoning: "I don't think the revival of authoritarianism is likely to be sustained simply because there's no capacity to solve the problems that led to the uprisings in the first place. "The reason Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Salman is pursuing change is because he understands that even a regime as wealthy as Saudi Arabia's can't suppress change forever. There's a sense that the old regime is coming to an end." And, for a regime as odious as the Saud family's, a regime that uses its billions to sponsor fundamentalist jihadist Islamism everywhere from Brussels to Jakarta, that day cannot come too soon.