A Struggle for Meaning and a Search for Consensus Around Groundwater Overexploitation in Morocco

For over fifteen years now, the Moroccan government, and more specifically the hydraulic basin agencies responsible for water management, have been warning of groundwater ‘overexploitation’ in several regions of the country, and calling for more rational and sustainable use of these resources, which are being depleted by their current uses and by climate change. In this paper, we revisit the definition of this phenomenon as a ‘public issue’ (Neveu, 2015), focusing both on the arenas in which the problem is framed (Gilbert & Henry, 2012) but also on the discourses relating to its political implementation (Barthe, 2000). By analysing the implementation of several ‘aquifer contract’ schemes in Morocco, we demonstrate how the various players involved in these projects are participating in a redefinition of the problem. This process is largely shaped by two intertwining and paradoxical tensions. The first relates to the existence of sectoral competition constituting a ‘struggle for meaning’ (Contamin, 2010), while the second arises from the search for a coherent national strategy on the issue, leading these rival actors to seek a form of consensus. Beyond this, we show that the stakeholders agree on a minimal definition of the problem, mainly considering the socio-economic risks associated with the availability of the resource. Finally, the problem is politicised through a form of ‘ambiguous consensus’ (Palier, 2003) based on localised irrigation techniques known as ‘drip irrigation’ (Venot et al., 2017), with significant ambiguity regarding the concrete impacts of these techniques on groundwater resources.