Assembling Land Access and Legibility: The Case of Morocco’s Gharb Region
ISBN: 978-1-78756-428-2, eISBN: 978-1-78756-427-5
Publication date: 13 March 2019
Abstract
Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to all of the Moroccans who participated in my research, opened their homes to me, and patiently answered my many questions. I acknowledge the generous funding of the Fulbright program, which provided support to carry out my fieldwork. Brad Dillman, Karen Rignall, Fida Adely, Ethan Balgley, and James Miller provided invaluable comments in drafting this chapter, and any remaining errors are entirely my own. I extend particular thanks to Ammar Hamdache, who served as a mentor to me during my fieldwork and shared his deep knowledge of the Gharb’s history.
Citation
Balgley, D. (2019), "Assembling Land Access and Legibility: The Case of Morocco’s Gharb Region", The Politics of Land (Research in Political Sociology, Vol. 26), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 123-148. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0895-993520190000026010
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2019 Emerald Publishing Limited