Environmental and Socioecological Transformations in Morocco

Pablo Dominguez, PhD (UAB), Research Fellow CBCD (2012-2014)

Introduction

Scholars from several disciplines have stressed the importance of locally evolved and culturally specific collective management systems of natural resources for the well-being of local communities and for the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Environmental history and Landscape ecology have highlighted the role of specific practices of resource management in the configuration of heterogeneous landscapes at multiple spatial and temporal scales, and across many different taxa and ecosystems of the Earth (Balee 1994; Benton et al. 2003; Turner 2005). Ethnoecologists have shown that these management practices, performed by indigenous and rural groups, are embedded in particular belief and knowledge systems. They increasingly are investigating the acquisition, transmission and loss of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in relation to factors such as age, formal education, and integration to market economies, and how knowledge loss affects the sustainability of socio-ecosystems (Toledo 1992; Reyes-García 2009). In fact, these management systems, usually performed by resource-poor farmers, have been proven to contribute to the conservation of biodiversity through the use of more varieties, species, and landscape patches than do most of the modern agricultural and food production systems, and to increase the capacity of the socioecological systems to adjust to an increasingly changing environment (Berkes and Turner 2006; Berkes et al. 2000; Ostrom et al. 1999; Dietz et al. 2003; Altieri 2002). Similarly, the science of ecology and its various applied fields have experienced a conceptual shift towards the understanding of ecosystems as complex systems in which humans are an integral part (Berkes 2004; Gomez 2010). Others have supported the idea that biodiversity conservation and human well-being are very often complementary goals that should be tackled together from the ground up (Berkes 2007; West et al. 2006; Adams et al. 2004).

However, despite the increasing scientific recognition of local management systems and at least two decades of increasing awareness by civil society and policy-makers (Reyes-García 2008), the harsh reality is that they are being rapidly eroded in the course of the progressive interconnection of people and ecosystems under the rules and forces of global markets (Sutherland 2003; Maffi 2005). Given such failure, there is clearly a misunderstanding of the science-policy interface. This is the reason why scientific research and the training of young scholars in action-research is needed.

Endeavours to halt the erosion of local management systems and the linked loss of bio-cultural diversity largely depend on alternative and critical inquiries driven from within the community’s perception and aimed at gaining a profound understanding of the socioecological transformations being experienced by these systems under current global change. From a reflexive anthropological standpoint on the transgressions that development projects can perpetrate, scientists must adopt a highly critical assessment of North-South cooperation actions. What is seen frequently as an act of “goodness” – such as co-development and cultural hybridization between the “developers” and the “developed” (Martínez & Larrea 2010) – may be just a new type of cultural colonisation.  Only when both categories reach a certain level,of awareness of their actions that we try to put in place, will it be possible to really advance into co-development. These epistemological difficulties must be absolutely taken in account when choosing the analytical and educational tools of action-research. This is observed to occur even in the newest programs of Community-Based Conservation (CBC) which, masked under the false label of «participative» processes, many times still perpetuate the imposition of external top-down approaches based on expert knowledge and rational planning of resource use to sort out the environmental degradation caused by what in fact is still implicitly thought to be ignorant peasants (Mansuri and Rao 2004; Ulloa 2002).

Objectives and Methods

We showed the empirical relevance and practical potential of such a theoretical approach through research aimed at studying collective management system of natural resources and their potential. These are widely spread and especially alive in  the Berber agdals of Morocco. These systems of environmental management consist of a temporary prohibition of access to common pastures, forests and other natural resources in order to secure their renewal, and can be even considered as a common Maghrebian heritage resulting from several millennia of socioecological convergence. In the case of the Maghreb, agdal systems have secured the long-term survival of local communities thanks to successful management of common-pool resources, and still do. This is why we concentrate a great part of our research efforts in the Maghreb, where we are able to find unique case studies, as they are some of the few examples still alive in the western Mediterranean.

The Magrebi systems are experiencing dramatic transformations including demographic growth; national and international out-migration; increasing frequency of droughts; introduction of mass media; market integration; overgrazing, encroachment of agriculture in marginal lands and expansion of monocultures; and loss of traditional religious beliefs in local Saints that used to help in their regulation of resource use  (Auclair et al. 2006; Mahdi 1999; Dominguez et al. 2010). These transformations are taking place in the course of a strong agro-technological change and a neoliberal restructuring –land privatization, agricultural intensification, privatization of the public sector and reduction of state services– that has been partly justified by a declensionist colonial scientific narrative blaming the “natives” for deforesting and overgrazing what was claimed to have been a much more forested landscape (Davis 2006; Davis 2007). It is precisely this socioecological system, in full dynamism, that we make comprehensible in this postdoctoral research.

Without the collaboration of local groups it would be impossible to conduct research and education in action-research, thus it is important that Universities and research institutions of the rich North recognize the effort that local collaboration means. Only by establishing certain mechanisms of feedback to the local populations, such as bringing to them a certain monetary or infrastructural income, can one do deep research on these objects and sites. For example, through providing accommodation food and transport services, local communities gain income and thus more reason to host researchers, NGO’s and companies embarked on co-development projects. At the same time, this can also improve the results of our own studies thanks to local acceptance and make a real step towards education on action-research with the local communities.

Concerning the process of erosion of collective management systems of natural resources in the Mediterranean, it is leading to a highly uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of socioecological change among different social groups (Martinez-Alier 2002). There is the need to enhance a more inclusive and democratic mode of socioecological transformation through an endogenous, self-organised and adaptive political process drawing on various knowledge systems, in which new socioecological relations and institutional arrangements are to be built to lead the system to a desired and more resilient stability. This should be achieved through the training of future local and external agents of co-development. Another aim of the research identified different paths of socioecological transformation experienced by collective management systems of natural resources (CMSNR) in terms of livelihood security, social well-being and equity, cultural identity, intensity of resource use, type of landownership, landscape structure and functioning, use of biodiversity and resilience. Regarding the future strategies of conservation of CMSNR’s, special attention was paid to test and develop a concept of socioecological heritage as a distinctive set of accumulative patterns of socioecological interactions and practices that enhance local self-determination, identity and biodiversity (Auclair, Otero 2010), as well as the role it may play in human well-being and in the conservation of cultural landscapes.

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Dominguez, Pablo and Benessaiah, Nejm. 2015. “Multi-agentive transformations of rural livelihoods in Mountain ICCAs”, Quaternary International, 1-11.

Dominguez, Pablo. 2014. Current situation and future patrimonializing perspectives for the governance of agro-pastoral resources in the Ait Ikis transhumants of the High Atlas. In Herrera P.M., Davies J. & Manzano P. (coords) Global review of environmental governance in drylands and pastoral rangelands, Ed. IUCN and World Initiative for Sustainable Pastoralism, 126-144 pp.

Pablo Dominguez, et al., 2012. Culturally mediated provision of ecosystem services: The agdal of Yagour. Environmental Values Journal, 21: 277-96.