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Francesca Cresta

Political Economy of Sustainable Development and Environmental Change

12/11/2020

The unsustainability behind green actions in Morocco

The concept of sustainability has been increasingly used in political agendas. From

international conferences to local policies, sustainability seems to be one of the main goals of world

governments since the UN Conference on Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. However, the

meaning of the concept itself is often unclear, as it is extremely complex. Sustainability lies at the

nexus between society, environment, and the economy (Dietz, 2001; Fluentes, 2002). In many

instances, since political agendas focus on growth and economic development, the three elements

interact in a sub-optimal manner: environmental sustainability could be in that case used as a façade

to obtain economic growth at the expense of minorities or powerless groups of people. These

relations of power, that are reiterated notwithstanding claims of sustainability, are described by the

concept of environmental injustice (Cock & Koch 1991).

Morocco is one of the leading state actors in the development of renewable energy (RE) in

the developing world, as well as one of the few countries with a policy framework that would make

the country abide to the Paris Agreement goals of limiting increase in global temperatures at 1.5°C

(Climate Action Tracker, 2020). Despite this, environmental injustice arises where in the Kingdom

privatisation of natural resources fosters green grabbing, inequity, and dispossession (Fairhead et al.

2012). The government has set ambitious plans to increase the share of energy coming from

renewable sources and efficiency, aiming at ending its dependency on foreign oil and coal. Yet,

contrary to what the dominant ideology is mainstreaming, liberalisation of the market to enhance
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competitivity, and the opening to foreign investment, including through the use of Clean

Development Mechanism (CDM), has dangerously put the government in debt towards the North

(Hamouchene, 2016). What is more, policies are imposing top-down changes that often completely

disregard community rights. Paradoxically, expropriation of precious natural resources such as

water and land has granted the country with the reputation of a leader in the green transformation.

While the Kingdom expands its RE capacity, issues related to sustainability arise. In

addition to preoccupations concerning property rights and debt, environmental sustainability itself is

at stake. Extractive mining of silver and phosphates is continuing, once again at the expense of

people and nature, polluting water and causing forced displacements (Hamouchene, 2019). Coal

powered stations are expanded at the same time as RE is promoted (Writer, 2018). The biggest

concentrated solar panel (CSP) farm itself is using incredibly large amounts of water to cool its

systems, while droughts increase in the country due to climate change (Fares & Abderafi, 2018).

These new attempts at liberalisation to develop a competitive RE production have worsened

inequality in the country without challenging the existing power and consumption discourse. Can

this behaviour be defined sustainable?

The energy sector has always been perceived as one of the most closely related to

development (Edenhofer et al., 2011). However, in order to define development as sustainable,

solely using renewable energy will not be enough in a future of increased inequality and worsened

climate conditions. Reducing the carbon footprint of the country must also derive from changes in

lifestyle and behaviour patterns (Owusu, 2016). International cooperation shall be made more

effective, with regular monitoring of commitments. Access to resources should be granted to all

citizens, together with the proper set of rights. As Kopnina (2016) argues, an ethical duty is required

to change the current status. In Morocco, urbanisation and technological development of RE are

putting duties towards people in last place, even when poverty and environmental degradation have

shown a two-way relationship (Gray and Moseley, 2005). There is a need to include more social
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values in sustainability, as a country that is increasingly unequal cannot be defined as developing in

a sustainable way.

Economic growth is often taken as a measure of well-being, even if it comes at an ecological

and social cost (Arogyaswamy, 2017). The Moroccan economy is growing rapidly, with per capita

GDP raising from 1206 in 1990 to 3222 in 2018 (World Bank Data, 2019). From 1990, infant

mortality was cut more than half (World Bank, 2014). However, Haq and collegues (2016) found

that growth and carbon emissions in Morocco form a U-shaped curve, without following the

Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. This implies that emissions are today increasing together

with GDP growth, hence the theoretical turning point where emissions start declining has not been

reached yet, and the country might not adhere to the path observed by Kuznets in the US (Cole et

al., 1997). Current GDP increase is causing a steep increase in carbon emissions, contributing to

higher future costs for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Continuing to compare current state of the economy with that of 1990, energy consumption

has more than doubled, due also to the almost complete electrification of the country. The Global

Rural Electrification Program (PERG), initiated in 2011, also brought relevant positive economic

benefits by expanding electric infrastructure and giving electricity to more than 42,000 rural

villages and 2.1 million households with the help of funding from the African Development Bank

(African Development Bank, 2014). However, CO2 emissions have also increased, by more than

75%, while per capita use of electricity has gone from 0.36 MWh to 0.92 MWh in 2018 (IEA,

2019). Since Morocco does not have any national reserves of coal and oil, the Kingdom had for

long been one of the biggest importers of fuels (U.S. Energy Information Administration, 2019). In

order to end this dependency and build a more sustainable future, as well as the possibility to export

clean energy to Europe, Morocco decided to invest in RE.

Through the National Energy Strategy (2009) the Kingdom has committed to reaching the

milestone of sourcing 42% of the energy produced from renewable sources in 2030 and 52% in
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2030. These objectives are part of the intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) of the

country to the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change. The growth in share,

largely rooted on strong policies of privatization and liberalization, has been helped by funds

coming from agencies such as the European Union, the United States Agency for International

Development, and the World Bank, to aid sustainable development. These agencies, using CDMs

and other financial means, are investing in the creation of RE sources offshore to consume clean

energy in the future. As Hamouchene (2019) points out, Europe is importing a large quantity of

goods from Morocco. Through the mise en place of trade agreements and financial liabilities, the

North is maintaining a certain level of control over the Kingdom.

The concretization of these plans has brought to the construction of the largest Concentrated

Solar Power (CSP) plant in the world, located at 10km from the city Ouarzazate, also called “the

door to the desert”. Going further beyond, the government is working, in close relations with

privates and international organisations, to exploit even more the RE potential in Morocco.

According to the Moroccan Ministry of Energy, Mines and the Environment, possibilities include

the production of hydrogen fuel for export and the use of residential waste to produce biofuels.

Lastly, policies to increase energy and water efficiency are already in place.

The country, through this top-down approach, has been able to implement all the policies

that are encouraged in several international agreements on sustainable development, including the

Paris Agreement. However, inequalities are growing. The Gini coefficient, measuring the distance

from an equal distribution of income, grew .3 points from 1990 to 2013, peaking at 40.7 in 2006,

despite the steadiness of Moroccan GDP growth (World bank, 2019). This lack of connections

between people’s well-being and green growth has brought political apathy within the masses, that

are not aware or do not believe in the green transition the country is operating. In fact, except for

some isolated projects, few people benefit from these investments (Metz, 2016). The majority is

still suffering environmental injustice because of other - or even the same “green”- government

actions (Hamouchene, 2019). Pollution and exploitation of natural resources are impacting to
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varying extents on citizens, with costs of development falling disproportionately on rural

communities.

Pollution is particularly evident concerning the mining and coal sector, that impact both

water and air quality. For example, the city of Safi hosts a phosphate factory, a cement factory, and

a coal-fired power station along its coastline. The massive pollution here affects workers’ and

inhabitants’ health directly as well as, indirectly, their finance. The highly polluted waters have

decimated the fish population hindering the fishing industry, while people have reported higher

occurrence of respiratory diseases, bone fragility and teeth yellowing (Abir, 2015; White, 2015).

Another instance is Khouribga, the biggest phosphate mine in Morocco. The extractions

started in 1923, but the town has not benefitted from the industry (Hiribarren, 2016). On the

contrary, there is a stark difference between the working-class neighbourhood, polluted and full of

waste, and the well-off neighbourhood where higher income, white collar workers, live

(Hamouchene, 2019). Poverty and marginalization are increasing in those cities where the benefits

from exploiting natural resources are shared within the few in power (Abir, 2015).

By boosting the industrialization of the country and investing in tourists’ attractions,

Morocco is often neglecting small villages and rural towns that lack basic services. This is called by

Bogaert (2016) “a contemporary form of global capitalism” where relations of power harm the

environment and increase poverty and inequality. Responding to this neoliberal conception of

development, protests have spurred from community members directly or indirectly affected by

these hazards, acting together with anti-capitalist environmentalist groups. A movement called

300km South has organised a march on road 96, 300 km from Marrakech where the COP22, the

2016 United Nations Climate Change Conference, was held. Activists from the Maghreb region

organised a simultaneous alternative conference with international guests to protest the COP22

climate talks (ATTAC Morocco, 2016). Development models promoted by international actors that

are centred on growth and RE development can also have direct negative effects on livelihoods.
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Using as a case study the CSP plant in Ouarzazate, we will now move to briefly presenting some of

those effects.

The solar power plant was commissioned in 2006 and is planned to have a capacity of 582

MW when completed. The plant was built 10 km from Ouarzazate, in a desertic and arid land,

particularly suitable for the exploitation of the energy coming from the sun to produce clean

electricity. As described by the World Bank (2014), the plant would help the national and global

economy in various ways. First, by ending Moroccan dependency on energy imports and providing

energy to more than a million Moroccans, creating jobs and implementing local development.

Second, by reducing carbon emissions and tackling climate change. Third, by exporting clean

energy to Europe, that is already connected to the Moroccan energy grid through underwater cables

placed in the Strait of Gibraltar (RED Electrica de Espana, 2019).

450 hectares of commonly owned land were thus acquired by the State in order to build the

plant. The Kingdom also created an ad hoc private company, the Moroccan Agency for Solar

Energy (MASEN), to defer the development of the energy station. For this reason, the land was then

sold to MASEN, that took charge of the rest of the process. The plant was successfully built and is

now beyond the first phase, already providing clean energy for the country. The dominant discourse

sees the revaluation of unused, unproductive land, and the transformation of that land in a land of

opportunities, both via job creation, technology and research opportunities, and energy

independence. However, this discourse is not complete. In fact, to carry out this ambitious project,

the Moroccan government had to find land, capital, and water.

The transferral of land ownership brought an uneven and profoundly unequitable

development to the area. The land that was valued as barren and inhabitable by the authorities that

bought it at 1 dirham (about 10 cents) per square meter, was a land owned by small pastoral

communities, who were making their living off natural resources (Rignall, 2015). The pastoral ways

of life were deemed unproductive, and the power station was seen as a way to benefit the whole

population. No reparations were provided to the people that were displaced to build the CSP plant.
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In the Environmental and Social Assessment of the power station, carried out by the African

Development Bank (ADB), we can clearly read “since the impact on the local community is

generally low and limited over time, no specific measure is necessary”.

The transfer of rights from communities took place without their consent, facilitating the

concentration of power in the hands of the already powerful, thus increasing inequality in the

region. This accumulation of wealth and ownership in favour of profit that is causing social inequity

is called by Fairhead et al. (2012) “accumulation by dispossession”. Another way of defining it is

“green grabbing”, which is the transfer of rights from the poor to the powerful in the name of an

environmentally sustainable growth (Rignall, 2015). These practices cause the perpetuation of

inequalities and the exacerbation of poverty, while consumption behaviours do not become more

sustainable, possibly only shifting environmental degradation elsewhere. The stark imbalances alter

access to land and water, widening the gaps between smallholders and companies concerning power

and ownership.

Access to water and its use was not only restricted by the transfer of land rights, but also

modified by the renewable power station. The region where the power plant is located is

increasingly suffering from droughts and floods because of climate change (Dai et al., 2018).

However, the power station can properly function only if cooled with a wet cooling system, using

up a precious and extremely scarce resource in that region. The plant needs about 3.5 cubic meters

per MWh (Fares & Adberafi, 2018), collected from the Mansour Eddabhi dam 12 km from

Ouarzazate. Considering the projected increase in water use for the city due to population growth,

the access to water will likely become harder and more costly in the future, mainly impacting on

poor communities that depend on agriculture (Dai et al., 2018). Tejada and Rist (2018) analyse the

nexus between water and land disappropriation in Peru, where lands are expropriated from small

farmers for biofuel production, making the access to water almost impossible. In this case, similarly

to what happens in Ouarzazate, companies would buy land to exploit its “unused potential”.

Furthermore, the impacts of green grabbing on water access are less immediate and “slippery”,
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because they occur overtime and it is a lot harder to locate responsibilities (Franco et al., 2013).

Other long-term impacts will occur if we consider the debts from international institutions

accumulated by the government to finance the project.

The building of the power station mainly came from loans from the European investment

Bank (1 billion USD), and other private investments (9 billion USD). Other sources of funding were

CDMs, tools already criticized sharply for their potential to be improperly used. Weaknesses

include the lack of a proper mechanism of reliable data collection and the lack of a shared definition

of sustainable development (Horstmann, 2017). The variability of interpretations from a host

country to the other make the CDMs tools difficult to control. Furthermore, they often offer

possibilities of “cutting corners”, seeking the reduction or offset of carbon emissions where it is

easier, and even more importantly, the cheapest (Hamouchene, 2016; Horstmann, 2017).

As mentioned above, the North could benefit in several ways from Morocco’s debt. This,

again, perpetuates structures of power that increase inequity and weaken the power of negotiation of

developing countries, that bear the costs of transition but do not accordingly benefit from it. The

issues presented above all have the common element of commodification of nature. To save nature,

green capitalism proposes turning it into a tradable good. In this vision of “selling nature to save it”,

however, assessments often fail to consider the social element of sustainability (Beymer-Farris &

Bassett, 2012). The next section will put forth some possible solutions to avoid green grabbing and

the increase in inequity following RE development and other green practices.

Including the three elements of sustainability, the social, the economic, and the

environmental, is essential to obtain a sustainable and equitable society. In order to do so, there is a

need of transparency and accountability for authorities, and consent form those communities that

will be in any way impacted. Information on projects and policies should be made clear and

available for the public. On the other hand, the media should provide more coverage to both sides of

the equation, without ignoring the voice of less powerful actors. At the same time, people should be

made more aware of the benefits that sustainable policies could bring to the whole population. One
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way to close the gap between the decision-making level and the masses is through the promotion of

local-level projects involving communities directly.

For instance, Decentralized/Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) projects maintain public

ownership and promote both mitigation and adaptation to climate change (Ley, 2017). Technologies

such as solar pumps help farmers to shift away from their dependency on fossil fuels. At the same

time, they provide them with free and clean energy to irrigate crops that are stressed by changes in

temperature (Lorenz, 2013). A successful project of this kind has already been carried out in

Morocco with the Green Mosques initiative (Ceurstemont, 2017). The idea consists in the

placement of solar panels on top of mosques, to produce the energy necessary to power them. The

initiative started in rural towns that were lacking affordable or cheap electricity and has now

widened its scope. In some cities, in fact, the solar panels power streetlamps at night, and other

public buildings.

DRE start from the local dimension to create local, national, and global benefits. Providing

people with the means, know-how and technology to shift they habits to a more sustainable way of

living can both reduce emissions and ensure a fairer development (Ley, 2017). Without transferring

rights, communities are made self-sufficient, therefore employment and security tend to increase.

Education levels also benefit from DREs: in the case of the Green Mosques, the electricity produced

made it possible for women to study and learn how to read and write after dark. Even more, street

illumination made towns safer. By seeing tangible changes in their livelihoods, people also better

understand the value of renewable energy and sustainability. They will in turn ask to be more

involved in decision making and demand further transparency.

Connected to transparency and even more importantly, rights must be respected. Abuses and

mistreatment of people from powerful groups should not be tolerated and hidden under

commitments to development that aim at profits without changing the status quo. For this reason, a

bottom-up perspective is often more successful at considering the needs of the more vulnerable

majority, that is often left at the margin of policy and decision making. Sustainability requires a
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coordinated action geared towards equity and accountability in all sectors. There should be no

compromises made between green growth and respect of people’s rights of property, health, and

development. Redistribution of power and wealth, equity, and justice are essential if market-based

mechanisms such as liberalisation and privatisation are chosen to develop.

In order to maintain those values intact, international organisations should pay attention to

avoid promoting models of development that harm shares of the population. The mandate of CDMs,

for example, should be expanded to monitor plans through external auditors and to include the

effect on development that are not directly related to carbon emissions (Condon, 2016). Social and

economic rights should be put at the centre of analysis, as actions that are harmful to the

environment are also likely to have an impact on people’s health and livelihood (UNEA3, 2017).

The economic dimension of environmental sustainability should be recognised as strongly

interrelated to the political one. Sustainable development also calls for a shift in the way we talk

about well-being. Measuring the success of a society in GDP does not effectively consider

inequalities and the respect of rights (Linner & Selin, 2013). Even in the case of developing

countries, growth should not be imposed from above but rather be a bridge with its foundations in

the local dimension.

In conclusion, the Kingdom of Morocco is pursuing ambitious goals in the reduction of its

consumption of imported energy coming from fossil fuel sources. The country is on track to achieve

these goals, being one of the few countries that will respect the emission targets established in the

Paris Agreement. However, there are still major issues inside the country, that need not to be

downplayed by this new green energy production. On one hand, the country continues to exploit

and extract resources such as silver and phosphate polluting and disproportionately affecting the

most vulnerable part of the population. On the other hand, the development of RE itself is

sometimes disregarding the rights of local communities. While these patterns might result in a net

reduction of carbon emissions, they should be considered when making evaluations on the
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sustainability of proposals. Increasing inequality and perpetrating the already existing power

structures, these processes do not account for the social dimension of sustainability.

International organisations that evaluate the sustainability of projects and aim at financing

green development frequently finance projects believing that unsustainable practices in one place

can be offset by sustainable practices elsewhere, subordinating one nature to another (Fairhead,

2012). In this way, a form of “contemporary global capitalism” takes shape and exploitation is

multiplied instead of stopped, while smaller villages are obliged to live with the side-effects

(Bogaert, 2016). In order to effectively obtain sustainable development, policy makers, the media,

the local community, and international actors all have to cooperate to obtain more transparency,

fairness, and accountability. Alternatives to exploitation that offer truly sustainable options might be

DREs, modified accordingly to the context in which they are situated.

Efforts to develop renewable energy will be only an additional source of energy to produce

more, if accompanied by relentless growth and consumption. Morocco is increasing the share of its

renewables and the relevance of its economy, but consumption is also increasing. While this might

be a positive in a developing country, the Environmental Kuznets Curve highlights a steep increase

in emissions. The development of environmentally friendly solutions to energy production is

accompanied by the continuous exploitation of both people and natural resources. While the

Climate Action Tracker paints Morocco green (2020), inequality is rising, and most people are not

benefitting from the green policies. A lot of people, on the other hand, are still suffering the costs of

unsustainable and powerful industries. When green growth is paired with the deepening of the gaps

in society, can we call it sustainable development?

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