Water Infrastructures Facing Sustainable Development Challenges: Integrated Evaluation of Impacts of Dams on Regional Development in Morocco

During the past century, large hydraulic infrastructures have been considered as the most effective tools for increasing water supply and rationalise water management. According to this approach, large infrastructures are seen as catalysts for territorial development and economic progress. More recently, international surveys of results of water supply policies and performances of large dams, show that these structures need to be integrated in more comprehensive Integrated Water Resource Management strategies at catchments’ scale, to promote equitable and sustainable regional development. The aim of this communication is to present the role of large hydraulic infrastructures within the regional development dynamics with particular attention to the Sebou basin in Morocco, in order to assess some relevant impacts on local communities and their ecosystems. The Sebou region is one of the most important basins in Morocco, in the context of the national strategies and policies of management of water resources, established by the Water Law of 1995. The development of hydraulic infrastructures in the Sebou Basin begun in 1935, with construction of a complex of ten large dams and nine small dams, to provide water for agriculture, domestic and industrial use, and to generate hydropower and control floods, in line with the national water policies that, from the 1960s onwards, looked at large dams as core infrastructures for regional development. A critical view will be given about the coherence of this strategy with the sustainability principles.Water Policy, Morocco, Dams, Sustainable Development, Impacts

Mega-irrigation and neoliberalism in postcolonial states : Evolution and crisis in the Gharb Plain, Morocco

This article explores the development, evolution and impacts of large-scale irrigation schemes in the formation of the postcolonial state of Morocco and in more recent neoliberal decades. In particular, the article focuses on the Gharb Plain in the Sebou River basin, which was targeted by huge investments to become the core region for national development. In this area, three stages of development – colonial, early independent, and the aggressive politique des grandes barrages post-1970 – have created two clearly different and successive landscapes. The traditional landscape has been overlain, and largely obliterated, by colonial and postcolonial governmental landscapes, reflected through different spatial, economic, cultural, and political patterns over time. In the present, a fourth stage of neoliberal development is occurring in the landscape, in which diffused poverty and ecosystem collapse coincide with greater concentrated wealth and the building of technological infrastructures. The article aims to complement critical studies on neoliberal environments, by focusing in particular on the manipulation, dispossession and commodification of water and land resources in irrigated agriculture in Morocco. These emerging rationalities are closely related to the changing policies of the contemporary Moroccan state.Peer reviewe