ABSTRACT
Developing human communities and meeting their needs can be done in different ways that can reflect very different understandings of the meaning of progress and modernity. All of them, however, require water. The approach undertaken by many newly independent countries followed a logic of rapid modernization based on important investments into infrastructure and technology. Morocco is no exception. There, modernization originally mainly focused on the agricultural sector and the construction of important water infrastructure. Mastering nature through technology was the drive for these global changes and would lead to economic changes. Exports, strategic changes in agricultural crops, in the scale of farms, in the nature of the labour force, in the size of investments … all contributed to modernizing the economy. This transformed the water governance system, water stakeholders, and participation and decentralization processes. The reforms of the water governance system still need to be improved if the rural world is to be better involved in strategic decision-making processes. Overall, this chapter demonstrates how modern water management led to rapid changes through “a market economy whose liberalism benefited those who have power, information and money, and which has broken down society by devaluing rural economic and social logics” (Krouz, 1992: 120).
