#  Commodifying the Desert: Colonial Formulas and Ancestral Lands in Morocco’s Renewable Energy Sector 

 



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   ![Aerial view of a vast solar power plant with rows of reflective solar panels in a desert landscape.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/feature-aelgamal-opening-700px.jpg?itok=CN9ZXK9t) 

 

## By Asmaa Elgamal

  
If you type “Sahara Desert” into a dozen different AI image generators, you will almost invariably get the same result: vast swaths of unperturbed sand, unobstructed views of the horizon, and a yellow tint that recalls the thick, oppressive heat of sun-soaked landscapes.

At first blush, this seems accurate. In fact, the Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy (Masen) portrays this imagery in a [promotional video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdqN3xX5mAk&ab_channel=Masen), where vast, empty landscapes are set against the backdrop of a string of suspenseful melodies. As the tempo picks up, a male voice narrates the journey of Morocco’s transition to renewable energy sources. Before Masen’s intervention, “these arid plains were completely untouched by human activity,” he says, his BBC English accent lending additional authority to the words.

However, upon closer examination, the alleged emptiness of the desert is a mirage. An [estimated 2.5 million people](https://www.britannica.com/place/Sahara-desert-Africa/Study-and-exploration) live in the Sahara, among them Indigenous groups such as the Amazigh, Tuareg, and Sahrawis. The desert habitat is harsh, and though many still live there, the population has dwindled over the years.

There is nostalgic yearning expressed in the words of Sahrawi poet Badi, whose paean to the simple pleasures of Bedouin life tells a story of an intimate connection to the desert. The title of the poem, “[Tishuash](https://underagreysky.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/tishuash_excerpt.pdf),” or “the pleasure of remembering things that are past,” conveys a sense of loss toward the lives once sustained by the arid climate of the Sahara:1

> All that has been has gone,   
> (how great the living and everlasting God!)   
> but how beautiful this scene is!
> 
> I see it sometimes –   
> no particular place –   
> just there with the goats,   
> like those nights I spent   
> at the mouth of a well,   
> making the wet sand my bed.   
> Enchanted by night’s music:   
> the howl of wild dogs   
> and insects’ whine.

These two images of North Africa’s arid landscape—the barren, idle, and unproductive lands in the video, memories of vibrant human and nonhuman forms of life in the poem—are difficult to reconcile. In the context of Morocco’s push to expand its renewable energy sector, the latter is often overlooked. But indelibly intertwined in the Kingdom of Morocco’s renewable energy story is another story: one imbued with the legacies of colonial exploitation. This story is of a desert that is neither idle nor unproductive, but one that bears witness to a long history of land rights that are coming to the forefront as the acquisition of land for renewables accelerates.

### **A Climate Trailblazer** 

  
Morocco has made great strides in the renewable energy sector, and Masen is a key player in this effort, supporting the Kingdom’s ambition to produce 52 percent of the country’s energy from renewable sources by 2030. The agency is investing in a vast array of solar, wind, and hydro energy projects, chief among which is the [Noor solar power plant](https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/06/motorsport/morocco-solar-farm-formula-e-spt-intl/index.html) in the southeastern region of Ouarzazate.

Noor is not only one of Morocco’s biggest renewable energy projects, but the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant. The first stage of the project was completed in 2016, with subsequent phases launched in 2018 and 2019. Built on approximately 3,000 hectares of land—an area nearly nine times the size of New York City’s Central Park—the entire complex is designed to provide 580 megawatts of energy.

These investments have carved a place for Morocco as a trailblazer in the field of renewable energy in North Africa. The climate and topography of the region, particularly the abundance of year-round sunshine, make it a prime location for investments in solar and wind farms.

Within this context, Morocco is slated to become one of the largest exporters of energy to Europe. As the continent seeks to reduce its reliance on Russian gas, investors are pumping funds into the construction of submarine cables that would transport energy from North African deserts to European electricity grids. The largest among these is the proposed $25 billion [Xlinks Morocco-UK Power Project](https://xlinks.co/morocco-uk-power-project/), which would transport—through 3,800 kilometers of submarine cables—energy from the southern region of Guelmim Oued Noun in Morocco to the English town of Alverdiscott in North Devon.

   ![Map showing a red line tracing a route hugging the eastern Atlantic Ocean from Morocco to the UK.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/feature-aelgamal-map-700px.png?itok=XXPnXErD) 

 

### **Desert Experiments**

  
Central to these projects is the imagery, captured in the Masen promotional video, of arid landscapes as vacant, uninhabited, and underused. In a recent [*Washington Post* article](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/04/13/morocco-europe-solar-desert/), Michael Birnbaum writes that “industry experts say there is little practical barrier to significantly expanding solar projects in Morocco, since there are wide expanses of land that aren’t being used by farmers and don’t have significant economic value.”

Such narratives reinforce what Amazigh Indigenous scholar Brahim El Guabli calls “[Saharanism](https://themarkaz.org/experimental-saharanism-exploiting-desert-environments/),” or “a pervasive ideology that universalizes deserts, anchoring them in the popular imagination as empty, exploitable, and interchangeable spaces.” In doing so, he adds, Saharanism transforms deserts into a *res nullius* (“property of no one”), readily available for exploitation and experimentation by states, militaries, venture capitalists, and other actors.

Narratives about the purported desertedness of deserts have their roots in colonial discourse, which justified the occupation, appropriation, and exploitation of arid zones. For instance, in her edited volume, [*Deserts Are Not Empty*](https://cup.columbia.edu/book/deserts-are-not-empty/9781941332740), historian Samia Henni details how the French colonial army tested the country’s first atomic bombs between 1960 and 1966 in the Algerian Sahara. At the time, General Charles Ailleret, head of the French nuclear program, described the Sahara as “a land of thirst and fear, from which all life was reputedly absent.”2

Yet these spaces, as the title of Henni’s book suggests, are far from empty. Indeed, one need look no farther than the rich history of desert poetry across North Africa to be reminded of the peoples and communities that call these lands home.

But if deserts are not empty and their landscapes are not a *res nullius*, to whom do they belong and how, in the context of Morocco, are they being harnessed in the interest of renewable energy?

### **Commodifying the Commons**

  
Morocco is home to approximately fifteen million hectares of collective lands, an area slightly larger than the country of Greece. These territories, the majority of which are pasture lands, belong to various Indigenous tribes and tribal confederations. They are placed under the management of Majlis al-Wisayah, or the “Tutelary Council,” an administrative body under the leadership of the Moroccan Ministry of Interior. In consultation with tribal representatives, the council makes decisions on leases, sales, and other issues on behalf of an estimated ten million individual rights holders who descend from these tribes.

The land acquired for the new Noor solar power complex used to be held under collective title by the Indigenous tribal confederation of Aït Oukrour. Before construction began, this land was transferred from Aït Oukrour to the ownership of Masen in a deal brokered by the Moroccan Ministry of Interior in 2010 for the low price of one dirham (around ten US cents) per square meter.

As a consequence of this deal, eight thousand villagers lost access to their collective pasture lands. Meanwhile, money from the sale was deposited in an account in the name of Aït Oukrour, to be managed by the Ministry of Interior in the interest of development initiatives in the region. In spite of the anticipated environmental benefits of the project, land rights activists, local residents, and other observers have criticized the deal for its lack of political transparency and the low terms of compensation, dubbed a “symbolic dirham.”3

Importantly, the sale of the Aït Oukrour lands was governed and facilitated by a colonial-era law, the Dahir of 1919, which placed Morocco’s collective lands under the tutelage of the state. The Dahir of 1919, which remained (with minor amendments) in effect until as late as 2019—that is, one hundred years after its creation and sixty-three years after Moroccan independence—has enabled both the preservation of lands under collective title as well as their transformation into private property.

   ![A shepherd tending a flock of goats in a vast desert landscape with snow-capped mountains in the background.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/wcfia/files/feature-aelgamal-shepherdmorocco-700px.jpg?itok=UYT1RRKY) 

 

### **Colonial Anxieties** 

  
To understand this paradox, one must return to the dilemmas of colonial rule in the early twentieth century—well before Morocco gained independence in 1956. With the declaration in Morocco of a French protectorate in 1912, colonial policymakers were faced with a number of political predicaments. As a case of late European imperialism, the conquest of Morocco yielded both benefits and drawbacks of hindsight.

The French colonization of neighboring Algeria in 1830—a particularly brutal conquest marred by blood, resistance, and mass dispossession—served as a cautionary tale for French officials in Morocco on the pitfalls of misguided policy. In addition, they had to contend with a waning appetite in the metropole for new overseas colonies, further complicated in 1914 by the onset of the First World War. As France sent its troops to the war front in Europe, fewer resources were available to pursue the ongoing conquest of its Moroccan territories. In the meantime, French officials also wanted to move forward with their capitalist vision for Morocco’s development, which included plans for colonization and large-scale agricultural production.

In other words, colonial policymakers had to find the means through which to acquire and exploit Morocco’s land resources without precipitating an Algerian-style wave of mass dispossession, which according to the lessons of history, would only intensify resistance to the French colonial project—a scenario they could ill-afford in the context of depleted resources and an ongoing conquest. Moreover, in contrast to some of their predecessors in Algeria, French officials in Morocco believed in a hearts-and-minds approach that favored what they called a policy of “association” over one of forced assimilation.

### **A Legal Formula**  


   ![Cover of ](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/wcfia/files/feature-aelgamal-lepetitjournal-400px.jpg?itok=oUwSU9it) 

 

The product of these considerations was the Dahir of 1919. Though theoretically, the collective ancestral lands of Moroccan Indigenous communities had been declared inalienable—that is, nontransferrable—the legislation installed provisions which, by admission of French jurist Louis Milliot, effectively “destroyed the very principle of inalienability so soon after having proposed it.”4 According to the legislation, Indigenous tribes were to be treated as minors in need of protection against their own “improvidence.” This translated into the creation of the Tutelary Council,5 which in fulfilling “the duties of a diligent tutor and a good father,”6 made decisions about land leases, including short-term, medium-term, and eventually, “perpetual” leases, the latter more or less constituting a full transfer of land rights.

The logic behind this legislation was, in the words of Colonel Huot, a senior colonial administrator, that one cannot “Frenchify the property before one Frenchifies the man.”7 A mass confiscation of land or a rapid transition into individual private property would risk creating a disgruntled Muslim proletariat susceptible to thoughts of armed resistance.

Nevertheless, Huot insisted, there was no question of “freezing tribal lands in an archaic formula and getting in the way of the natural current that tends towards the individualization of land.” Once the Tutelary Council deemed native populations “sufficiently evolved” and in possession of the necessary “proprietary education,” it could authorize the individual ownership of collective lands.8

### **What’s in a Legacy?**

  
The Dahir of 1919 was not just a solution to a political dilemma or a tool for the appropriation of ancestral lands—it was also a state-building strategy calculated to maintain a healthy reserve of land resources for future exploitation. In some ways, it was designed to serve the very purpose for which it remained in use nearly a century after its creation.

   ![View looking up from a narrow alley between tall sandstone buildings with small windows, showcasing a slice of blue sky.](/sites/g/files/omnuum8891/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/wcfia/files/feature-aelgamal-ouarzazate-v2-400px.jpg?itok=mk3UJgAi) 

 

The story of this legislation suggests that the legacies of colonial governance exist not only in the legal structures and political institutions it leaves behind, but also in the very logic of governance cultivated by those institutions. Though Colonel Huot had anticipated the necessary “propriety education” of the native Moroccan population would require approximately ten years, the Dahir of 1919 proved more durable than his estimates. Its replacement in 2019 by a new legislation that maintains the Tutelary Council but allows the individualization of collective lands at an accelerated speed suggests that the original aims of its architects—to move toward a model of individual property ownership—are coming to fruition.

As the Kingdom continues to invest in its renewable energy infrastructure, collective lands and the colonial calculations that govern them will undoubtedly remain part of Morocco’s environmental story.

*Asmaa Elgamal is the Hicham Alaoui Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Scholars Program. She holds a PhD from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.*

## Captions  


1. Noor Power Station in the Drâa-Tafilalet region of Morocco. *Credit:* [*Adobe Stock*](https://as1.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/04/78/85/24/1000_F_478852420_9P4JlArD2MPXuT8ViNuSrZCwvH0t2pzt.jpg)
2. Map showing approximate route of proposed XLinks power cable from Morocco to England, 4 February 2023. *Credit:* [*Wikimedia Commons, Bearas*](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Morocco-UK_Power_Project_link.svg) *(*[*CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED*](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en)*)*
3. Shepherd and Toubkal Mountain, Morocco. *Credit:* [*Flickr, doevos*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/doevos/4212218688/) *(*[*CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED*](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en)*)*
4. L’Abdication de Moulay-Hafid. *Le Petit Journal.* *Supplément du Dimanche, Numéro 1136, 1912-08-25*. *Source:* [*gallica.bnf.fr, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, public domain*](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Abdication_of_Abd_al-Hafid_of_Morocco_(1912,_Le_Petit_Journal).jpg)
5. Ouarzazate, Morocco. *Credit:* [*Flickr, leiris202*](https://www.flickr.com/photos/60584010@N00/21618708544/) *(*[*CC BY-NC 2.0 DEED*](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en)*)*

## Footnotes  


1. Sam Berkson and Mohamed Sulaiman, *Settled Wanderers: Poetry of a Landless People*. (Influx Press: 2014).
2. Quoted in Samia Henni (ed.), *Deserts Are Not Empty*. (Columbia University Press: 2022).
3. See Atman Aoui, Moulay Amhed El Amrani, and Karen Rignall, “Global Aspirations and Local Realities of Solar Energy in Morocco.” *MERIP Middle East Report 296* (2020); Zakia Salime, “Life in the Vicinity of Morocco’s Noor Solar Energy Project.” *MERIP Middle East Report 298* (2021)
4. Louis Milliot, *Les Terres Collectives : Étude de Législation Marocaine*. (Paris : Ernest Leroux, 1922), 62.
5. During the colonial era, the Council was headed by the Director of Indigenous Affairs, later transformed into the Ministry of Interior. Though the Council also included Moroccan notables and other colonial administrators, the Director had the authority to act unilaterally.
6. Quoted in Rivet, *Lyautey et l’Institution Du Protectorat Français Au Maroc 1912–1925 (Vol. 2)*. (Paris : L’Harmattan, 1996), 206.
7. Colonel Huot, “Les terres collectives du Maroc et la colonisation Européenne.” *Renseignements Coloniaux. Supplément de l’Afrique Française : Bulletin mensuel du Comité de l’Afrique Française et du Comité du Maroc*. (August 1923), 285–286.
8. Huot, “Les terres collectives du Maroc et la colonisation Européenne,” 288–289.



 



 

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