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Mohamed Aderghal (Geographer, full professor, faculté des lettres et des sciences humaines – université Mohamed V, Rabat)
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Mohammed Benidir (Sociologist, associate professor, Institut national d’aménagement d’urbanisme – Rabat)
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Tarik Dahou (Anthropologist, research director at the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) – UMR PALOC (CNRS/IRD/MNHN-SU)
Neoliberalism is not a new phenomenon in the Maghreb: it has long been inspiring economic reforms. These reforms, which are in keeping with the European neighborhood policy, are marked by an international division of labor based on exports to international markets in which states must fit. In the 2000s, a political economy of liberalization emerged in the region (Cammett, 2008). It was mainly analyzed through the prism of public action oriented towards the market and businesses, by identifying the evolution of the modes of government (Catusse, 2008) and the territorial inequalities stemming from government measures (Bono et al., 2015), as well as through social inequalities and the resistance to this new economic order in an authoritarian context. Many sectors were affected by these policies, even if the first studies focused on industries (Cammett, 2007), deindustrialization, and deteriorating terms of trade. Subsequently, researchers paid increased attention to the primary sector, which was also strongly impacted by these policies at the turn of the century (Dahou et al., 2013). Despite rising sustainable development concerns since the 1990s, redefining growth in the primary sector in the region has belatedly taken the environmental question into account.
So far, studies on the Maghreb have drawn little on the contributions of political ecology, apart perhaps marginally from those addressing water management, with an approach likely to account for the growing scarcity of water under the effect of a distribution that favors cash crop agriculture and for its consequences in terms of access inequalities. Land management has also been the subject of studies likely to shed light on the impact of recent reforms, which tend towards the creation of a land market, through a focus on the marginalization, whether potential or actual, of small farmers in the region. However, these approaches have placed little emphasis on environmental justice (Deldrève et al., 2019), despite the inequalities that run through such issues. Sustainable development has scarcely been the subject of critical analysis, even though its policies extend to many sectors, including those based on unabashed productivism. In this thematic issue, the aim is thus to propose a critical analysis framework for the sustainable development with which the states in the region comply in a normative and instrumental manner, leading to a growing number of measures that have an impact in terms of power (Davis, 2006).
Neoliberalism in the Maghreb takes on specific forms, to the extent that the state remains central due to the allocation of structuring factors, such as land and water, having often reconstituted its investment resources (Mayaux and Rousseau, 2021). Subsidy policies are now geared towards private initiative and the development of businesses in the primary sector. Although the markets are partly deregulated, they are not less often influenced by the state’s clients, with standards that restrict competition to the detriment of small productive or commercial actors. Therefore, liberalization involves the strengthening of market mechanisms through standards as much as through state intervention favoring types of production that are autonomous from social mechanisms such as rent sharing and environmental problem mitigation, although the state remains the guarantor in the end. By applying differentiated productive and environmental standards, the state evicts some actors and sometimes even subjugates civil society and certain social movements.
The advent of neoliberalism cannot be reduced to univocal privatization and it makes the state a strategic actor in a contingent process (Heynen and Robbins, 2005; Castree, 2005). This process is visible in the way in which Maghreb states have renegotiated the land reforms promoted by international institutions, with privatization as the ultimate outcome, and have applied them tacitly, by making some of their civil servants the masters of local land allocation, in particular through the resolution of conflicts of use. Similarly, the status of water resources does not necessarily change with liberal reforms, but laissez-faire is likely to encourage the state’s clients, to the detriment of small farmers who do not have the capital to appropriate deep resources. On liberalized agricultural markets, the state government relies on delegating to economic operators under its control. In the region, particularly in rural areas, liberalization does not always explicitly oppose classes (Harvey, 2006), but most often it involves the more or less formalized arbitration of the conflicts to which deregulation gives rise. The “informalization” of state action (Elyachar 2005) is sometimes a channel through which liberalization spreads, partly making indirect modes of government invisible. Local studies are thus likely to account for the unstable nature of the advent of liberalization and the challenging of the ensuing forms of power (Benidir, 2021).
The different forms of neoliberalism (laissez-faire, market organization, and the deregulation of public policies) can be observed in sustainable development policies. They can be conveyed by the transfer of global development paradigms to state-promoted management models, or stem from local dynamics of conflict and appropriation as some try to take advantage of these reconfigured policies and instruments. These dynamics reflect extremely varied neoliberal configurations, depending on the national spaces or territories considered, even if the general trend at work is one of exclusion. Tensions and alliances between social groups that play different cards according to their interests come to light through the unstable balance between actors confronted with erratic market dynamics, contrasting relations with the state, and evolving power relations following the changes in institutional, political, and economic resources. Through such links between diverse actors, which are typical of the liberalization process, incomplete and unstable forms of government take shape.
Beyond the fact that social injustices in the Maghreb are due to the unequal way in which the state and its public policies operate (Bono et al., 2015), including from a historical perspective when considering the colonial legacy (Dahou, 2018) and its reproduction in the developmental state, it seems appropriate to examine the sustainable development program implemented both in the name of the environment and of market accumulation. If this program is likely to scarcely consider equity as a criterion, it is due to its original sin: designing its actions exclusively in the light of its neoliberal matrix. The methods to implement sustainable development give pride of place to market instruments for regulating resources and their allocation (Buscher and Fletcher, 2020). Forms of association between public and private actors are almost always the rule in sustainable development policies, and it is essential to grasp their concrete dynamics to understand how inequalities are generated. Beyond the performative and positive nature of the discourse associated with sustainable development, it is useful to return to this very notion, so as to examine its liberal economic leanings, and thus better understand its variations and impact according to the historical and anthropological context (McCormack, 2017).
The foremost aim of this thematic issue is to produce an analysis of the contradictions of sustainable development policies by examining the discourse on the sustainability of economic prospects along with the constraints of resource conservation. Behind the coloration of sustainable development goals, not only are biodiversity and resource conservation – which are a guarantee of the long-term social reproduction of communities – at stake, but also the equal or unequal distribution of resources and of the income associated with them. This analysis of the social construction of scarcity, a phenomenon worsened by climate change, is likely to reveal the inequalities that result from it.
Combining the examination of the social construction of inequalities and the analysis of the material effects of policies on resources and ecosystems, a political ecology approach (Robbins, 2019) leads to taking an interest in the concrete impact of sustainable development measures. The aim is to capture the resource grabbing hidden behind claims of green or blue production, or social and environmental responsibility, based on empirical studies of the implementation of new sustainable development policies. In addition to the analysis of the material and social effects of these new growth policies, the focus will be on the transformations of the forms of government that they give rise to. Beyond resource distribution, it is crucial to be attentive to the power relations between actors. This analysis aims to assess the reconfiguration of power between state and society, based on institutional changes and, more specifically, on the public/private regulations resulting from these transformations.
The question of resource productivity, which is presented as an imperative objective of sustainable development in the rationalization of more careful resource management, is imposed through rationing logics. However, rationing tends to have more impact on access for certain categories of actors, in particular those with less investment power or agency. These processes will thus be examined from the perspective of different scales and stakes.
The channels for privatization can be complex insofar as the legal status of land and resources is not necessarily transformed, but evolves along with the related deregulation and conflict resolution. The state plays a decisive role in these processes through the zoning of spaces and by promoting diverse and unequal usufruct rights that gradually confirm appropriation rights, without necessarily privatizing the land. These processes latch onto conflicts that stem from a differentiated use of rights in a context of legal pluralism. It is hence relevant to document and analyze the restructuring due to environmental policies that are meant to guide land uses in a context of struggles for land appropriation or the related commercial rents. For example, the exploitation of forests and their resources creates property conflicts that bring divergent interests into play in the context of normative pluralism (Turner, 2009). In addition, different types of development or conservation projects disrupt the management of state-owned land (Aderghal, 2017) and lead to transformations in land standards and space appropriation, including indirectly with the privatization of resources stemming from land development, such as water or plant resources. Rangeland or state-owned land is thus the subject of bitter struggles, with conflicts that involve not only land appropriation but also the related resources according to their variations in status. Concessionary regimes for exploitation and conservation may be the subject of analysis as they have become increasingly widespread.
Conservation policies are a privileged field for market instruments that aim to put a price on whole swaths of nature, thus translating into privileged management measures (payment for environmental services, market instruments such as labels, implementation of transferable quotas, etc.). All these new instruments have not yet been the subject of systematic analyses and should be examined.
Thus, codes of sustainable exploitation, marine protected areas, or even fishing labels have been developing with the blue economy, although their effects in terms of unequal access to territories or species have not been characterized.
The inequalities inherent in forestry exploitation, with the impoverishment of forest populations, have led to a redefinition of forest management methods with the help of conservation rules. Today, these methods give rise to a certain number of ambiguities regarding the real management of forest exploitation and conservation by populations, and give rise to a number of appropriation conflicts between communities, or between communities, investors, and the state.
Soil conservation policies, which also aim at perpetuating the access to resources and the productivity of an agricultural sector in crisis, lead to use restrictions for small farmers or transhumant livestock farmers, producing new inequalities.
The deregulation of agricultural or forestry markets comes on top of state conservation policies that thus confirm differences in access to spaces and resources, leading to question both the legitimacy and the effectiveness of the greening of policies that are largely influenced by liberalization. In the implementation of these instruments related to integrated approaches, the impact of commercial actors on nature-based solutions can often be seen when the growth of new sectors for resource development only adds to intensifying commercial exploitation to the detriment of old uses, leading to resource scarcity and inequalities.
A number of inequalities in resource use can be concealed by the concepts of IWRM (integrated water resources management) and efficient management, since the continuity of access is at stake beyond rationalized resource use. Very often, during the rationalization process through a less wasteful use, what is at stake is a reallocation of resources that tends to concentrate volumes to the advantage of capitalist actors and to the detriment of family farming or environmental amenities.
The emphasis is placed nowadays on policies that increase water prices to better adjust supply and demand in order to limit use in a context of resource scarcity. These policies tend to transform water uses to make them more efficient and less wasteful, but also have adverse effects by tending to concentrate efforts on technological solutions that discriminate against those users who have less control over the market and have trouble adapting to it. For example, drip irrigation tends to intensify water use, thus resulting in inequity in its distribution. The use of alternative water sources may also lead to more difficult access to the resource for peripheral areas or users, and may tend towards a reallocation of this resource for uses other than food. The question of the investments needed for the production of these new sources may indeed lead to market solutions that exclude small operators.
In the measures meant to better regulate extractive policies, a legal framework has been developing across different dimensions. It better defines the management of environmental consequences and the accountability of private actors when it comes to the impact of their resource development. A double regulation through laws and standards has thus gradually been imposed on businesses. This calls for examining the status of impact studies within production as instruments to regulate private companies. The various forms of these instruments and their appropriation should be examined, by studying how the environmental impact of resource development is actually taken into account and how it concretely extends to the management of its social consequences.
In its relations with private actors, the fact that the state resorts to expertise is also likely to reveal inconsistencies in the implementation of these policies, while shedding light on the social support inequalities entailed. While these companies tend to replace the state in terms of development, what consequences do these normative changes bring about in terms of environmental justice?
Contributors to this thematic issue are invited to examine the aforementioned lines of inquiry, but their proposals may also cover other fields related to sustainable development, such as the multifaceted tensions and resistances that it gives rise to and strengthens: in the social field, in regional planning, in urban planning, and in housing.
The authors must submit an abstract in French, English, or Spanish, presenting their proposal in approximately 4,000 characters (with spaces), i.e. about 500 words or one page.
The Word file for the abstract must be entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-Proposal-260,” and must include:
- the title: short and precise, 70 characters maximum (with the possibility of adding a subtitle);
- the research question, the theoretical framework, the fieldwork, and the main results;
- the bibliographical references (not included in the character count).
For each author, a second file entitled “AUTHOR’S SURNAME-info” must include their first name and last name, their discipline, status, institutional affiliation, email address, and the name of the corresponding author.
For the proposals to be examined, it is essential that they follow these guidelines. Their suitability to the call for papers will be determined by the guest editors and the journal’s editorial board.
The authors whose proposals have been selected will be invited to send a first draft of their article, which must absolutely follow the guidelines for Authors. The articles will then be submitted to a double-blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic.
The articles (45,000 characters with spaces, excluding the abstract and references) may be written in French, English, or Spanish. They must be original work. They may however have been presented at a conference (with proceedings), as long as they have been adapted to the format required by the Revue internationale des études du développement, but the author must not submit their paper to another journal simultaneously.
The references cited must be presented in APA format.
The authors agree to comply with the calendar.
The proposals must be submitted by February 28, 2025 to:
m.aderghal@gmail.com
benidir.179@gmail.com
tarik.dahou@ird.fr
revdev@univ-paris1.fr
- The authors preselected by the editors and the editorial committee will be notified by the editorial team the week of March 5, 2025.
- The first draft, following the journal’s guidelines for authors, must be submitted by the authors to the aforementioned email addresses by May 13, 2025.
- The evaluation process will take a few months; each – anonymous – article will be submitted to a double blind peer review by two external reviewers who are experts on the topic. Requesting a first version of the article does not constitute a commitment from the journal to publish the aforementioned article, which must be approved by the editorial committee, following the different steps in the evaluation process. No 260 2026-1 is expected to be published in March 2026.