Mining and the Local Dynamics of Territorial Governance in Southeast Morocco

This chapter examines how extraction—metals and minerals mining—impacts local development planning and politics in southeastern Morocco. This research forms part of a larger collaborative project to explore residents’ experience of large-scale extractive projects in the arid periphery of the country. Comparing people’s lived experiences of a copper mine in Bleida, Zagora with those of the utility-scale solar installation under development in Midelt illuminates how histories of state territorialization, bureaucratic procedure, and fiscal policy all converge to produce similar dynamics around these large projects, whether conventional mining or renewable energy. For this chapter, we address one important dimension of these dynamics: how Morocco’s 2015 mining code and related policies influence local governance, especially the governance capacity of local communes. Extraction has long been central to colonization and nation building projects even before capitalist transformation placed fossil fuel and other forms of extraction at the center of industrialization. Even as dominant models of national development have left behind the modernist, post-World War II mega-projects as projections of state power, a new wave of extractivism has given life to new kinds of mega-projects. Understanding extractivism in “politico-economic terms as a particular way of structuring the processes of production and reproduction” that emphasize aggressive natural resource extraction brings seemingly disparate projects, like mining and solar energy, into the same frame of analysis.