Building a Farmers' Collective to Manage Groundwater in Morocco: Managing Differences without Erasing Them

The sustainability of irrigated agriculture, made possible by groundwater development, is increasingly threatened by growing pressure on water resources and climate change. Participatory approaches aimed at supporting the formation of collectives to improve groundwater governance often face significant challenges due to the heterogeneity and power imbalances between different stakeholder groups. Building a collective is difficult, especially as existing facilitating approaches are often insufficient. For instance, they develop multistakeholder platforms without paying attention to power relations or they work with g small-scale farmers only with the aim to empower them.

Using the case of an aquifer in Morocco’s Middle Atlas region, a multi-disciplinary research team sought not only to unveil prevailing disparities—whether socio-economic, political, ethnic, or symbolic—but also to account for them in creating a collective that would bring together various groups. This collective, whose formal organization will be a federation, enables these groups to communicate both among themselves and with authorities, while acknowledging and addressing the differences that divide them rather than erasing or ignoring them.

The methodology, which included citizen science, participatory workshops, focus groups, qualitative interviews, and sociological studies, evolved as the project progressed, fostering strong bonds of trust between the research team and local stakeholders. The lessons learned from this project’s participatory approach can serve as valuable guidance for improving participatory governance and management processes in groundwater-dependent regions.