Karen Rignall

Even as the 2016 elections brought increased public attention to rural life, stereotypes and misconceptions abound. One of these misperceptions is the generalization that prices are lower in rural areas. This article is a restudy of Zimmerman, Ham, and Frank (2008) research on geographic differences in the costs of living. Asking the same fundamental question—if someone bought the same thing in a rural and urban area, would they pay the same price?—and using the same methodology, the results 10 years later indicate that, contrary to popular perception, there was again no consistent pattern of lower prices in rural counties and no consistent pattern of a lower rural cost of living in all of the rural areas. While prices are only one piece of the larger picture of how rural households meet their needs, in addition to price differences, the results highlight how differences in rural life create additional costs that extend beyond prices.

Following best financial management practices that increase the likelihood of long-term economic sustainability is likely not the primary concern of nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits focus their attention primarily on achieving mission-driven goals. However, research reports that balancing financial sustainability with an organizational mission is a core challenge for most nonprofits, particularly for organizations serving low-income households. This article provides a case study of Farmer Foodshare Inc., a US nonprofit social enterprise in the food sector working with financially challenged family farms, food-insecure households, and low-income elementary school students. This case study was prepared with primary data collected during interviews and secondary sources. In the summer of 2019, the management team of Farmer Foodshare needed to revisit the organization’s operating model. Management in this organization was concerned about whether strategic decisions, such as discontin...

This chapter expands the account of rural political life to detail how state involvement in the valley sustained political pluralism as a central feature of local politics and social mobilizations. The chapter tracks how the colonial history of indirect rule shaped contemporary state strategies for asserting authority in marginalized rural zones. These strategies buttressed land and communal identity as the basis for rural governance and collective action. Although implanting a territorializing modern state in Morocco certainly involved dismantling many aspects of communal governance, the chapter then argues that state actors often seemed as invested as many nonstate actors in preserving the political pluralism of the rural southeast, including nonstate forms of communal authority. Ultimately, the chapter details how after independence in 1956, the practice of cultivating heterogeneity continued to inform state strategies for control and shaped the quotidian political life.

<p>This chapter discovers how different perceptions of communal governance produced competing environmental narratives about the causes and consequences of new land-use practices. It extends the author's argument that a pragmatic and grounded understanding of communal governance is necessary to disentangle peasants from the burden of preserving an idealized version of the commons. The chapter then shifts to focus on the intensively cultivated oasis of the lower valley and one plateau in the foothills that served as a staging ground for herds traveling to the igdaln at higher altitudes. It describes the dynamics in the borderlands between the steppe and the historical oases to suggest how we can recognize the historical resilience of natural-resource practices in places like the Mgoun Valley without reifying or romanticizing those practices. The chapter stretches the analysis of the agdal as socioecological patrimony to other practices and institutions at the heart of environmental narratives in the Mgoun Valley. It maps the social geographies of new land-use practices to describe an alternative set of narratives that nonetheless expressed its own contradictions and exclusions, then returns to how dominant discourses "patrimonialized" customary institutions — domesticated them as patrimony to be protected like a nature reserve after they had been politically contained and divorced from their wider roles.</p>

This chapter investigates the profound transformation in the meaning and practice of labor — on and off the land — over the previous half century as the Moroccan southeast was integrated into capitalist markets. The chapter takes the personal experiences of work, familial ties, and social change as a window into the profound transformation in the meaning and practice of labor in the Mgoun Valley. It then links an ethnography of work to agrarian practice, tracing how new labor relations simultaneously transformed and sustained the social reciprocity that undergirded moral economies in the valley. The chapter presents a snapshot of the transformations in livelihoods and agriculture through the initially deceptive results of the author's household survey. It also discusses the exclusions produced by the communal orientations that framed both agriculture and wage labor, from the gendered experience of work to the marginalization of households without access to certain kinds of labor.

This chapter presents the three main fieldwork sites by relating how different groups' efforts to reimagine communal governance simultaneously drew on and challenged customary tenure practices. As migration and other changes transformed agrarian rurality in the region, the chapter argues that customary land tenure remained a key site for contesting these historical inequalities and negotiating new approaches to communal governance. The chapter also chronicles what changed between the time Qlaʿa's notables rejected the French request to turn the village path into a road and the time, nearly a century later, when the residents of el Harte began to use that same path to transport their goods to market. The micropolitics of the path offer a window on the larger transformations throughout the Mgoun Valley. By considering the different ways residents of the valley invoked customary tenure in their struggles over collective life, the chapter complicates a common perception that int...

This chapter investigates the genealogy of collectively owned lands in Mgoun to argue that the division of the commons might represent a new form of communal action. It demonstrates how emergent definitions of the common good worked out through land conflicts in places like Ichihn might produce a new politics of the commons. Land conflicts in and of themselves were certainly nothing new in the Mgoun Valley or anywhere else in Morocco. With such awareness, the chapter describes the colonial transformation of collective sovereignty into collective property under the tutelage of the state. By folding collective lands into the state space of positive law, the French Protectorate simultaneously created the commons and undermined it. The chapter then looks into how the French colonial legacy shaped contemporary struggles around land. The chapter then proposes an alternative possibility: marginalized residents pursued hybrid private-property forms in an attempt to forge new kinds of “commo...

This book details the fraught dynamics of rural life in the arid periphery of southeastern Morocco. The book considers whether agrarian livelihoods can survive in the context of globalized capitalism and proposes a new way of thinking about agrarian practice, politics, and land in North Africa and the Middle East. The book questions many of the assumptions underlying movements for land and food sovereignty, theories of the commons, and environmental governance. Global market forces, government disinvestment, political marginalization, and climate change are putting unprecedented pressures on contemporary rural life. At the same time, rural peoples are defying their exclusion by forging new economic and political possibilities. In southern Morocco, the vibrancy of rural life was sustained by creative and often contested efforts to sustain communal governance, especially of land, as a basis for agrarian livelihoods and a changing wage labor economy. The book follows these diverse stra...

We estimate the present-day effects on rural Moroccan households of past international migration--specifically, recruitment to work in the French mines sixty years--and its associated remittances and pensions. Using cluster analysis twice—once to categorize households as poor and non-poor in the early 1960s and again to categorize the directly-descended household in 2014—we identify the households that moved upward economically over the intervening period. Seemingly-unrelated probit estimation is then used to gauge the degree to which migration facilitated this process. We find that migration significantly increased the likelihood that the sending family's current-day members would presently be non-poor. Surprisingly, we also find that the simple act of applying to migrate also has a similar effect. For the poorest (in the pre-migration period) of households, recruitment for work could well have been exogenous. For these households, migration to work in the French mines is, by f...

This article locates current debates concerning the gendered access to collective land in Morocco within the context of a wider discussion about colonial legacy and the construction of customary law. The colonial construction of the ‘ethnic community’ and the institutionalisation of ‘customary law’ have preserved custom as a legal category, but they have rigidified its application by integrating it to the framework of positive law. The way in which customary law and positive law mutually shape each other has produced a state-sanctioned system of structural exclusion of women from collective land. Today, various actors are challenging this system of exclusion. To do so they bring back to life colonial legal categories by using ‘custom’ to new ends and by reproducing the distinction between customary regimes that oppress women and a positive law that promotes equality. In this context, the importance of the colonial legacy is often simplified, or even at times forgotten.

T his essay addresses the conceptual question of how we understand gendered forms of social suffering in rural Morocco. In asking whether the fact of living in a rural area is at the root of women‘s experience of discrimination, I examine the dominant frames commonly used to interpret disparate health, educational, and other development indicators. Rather than assume rurality represents a repressive social context that produces these disparate outcomes because of tradition, custom, or religion, this essay contextualizes the marginalization of rural zones in Morocco. It offers a critical account of how rural areas came to occupy a structurally marginalized position in the national polity, global labor markets, and networks of capital accumulation. This position is structural in its durability and in the ways its seeming inevitability normalizes cultural explanations for gender disparities and poverty more generally. The essay uses ethnography and an interrogation of statistical indic...

Critical environmental scholars of the Middle East and North Africa have been rightly skeptical about narratives of crisis. These narratives have been used to justify colonial expropriation of resources and the repression of peoples whose livelihoods and lifeways threaten state power. As those narratives folded into international development agendas and post-independence policies, they have continued to support dispossession and the displacement of blame for environmental degradation onto marginalized peoples. Diana Davis has played a key role in unraveling the historical uses and abuses of environmental crisis narratives in the region.Most recently, she has detailed the spurious science and political underpinnings of desertification narratives that have had such an impact on those living in and around the Sahara. Her work—and that of other critical environmental historians and political ecologists—provides a critical framework for considering the financing facilities, development programs, and dominant discourses coalescing around climate change. We need to ask who wins and who loses when climate change is used to defend policies whose cost is disproportionately borne by those least responsible for environmental degradation. At the same time, I agree with the increasing number of scholars, activists, and popular writers who have begun to talk of climate “crisis” rather than climate change. We have likely reached the point where catastrophic global impacts are irreversible; the distribution of those impacts tracks gaping income inequalities that seem to be getting worse at the same pace as our carbon emissions. But what—and whose—crisis? Those of us who contribute most to climate change are also the ones who will literally or metaphorically ramp up the air conditioning in response to higher temperatures (among other impacts). Though this image is satisfying for crystallizing anger at collective inaction within the major emitting countries, the way it individualizes behaviors can also obscure the systemic, institutional, and infrastructural dead weight that locks us into a way of life predicated on burning carbon. Timothy Mitchell follows this infrastructure as an assemblage of social relations and pipelines, but we also need to think beyond the high-level geopolitical relations that tie the Middle East into climate change as one of the first major oil producing regions. Everyday patterns of consumption associated with the “ecology of the forces of capital” naturalize the capitalist power at the heart of climate change. These processes use discursive formations inherited from Euro-American colonialism to displace the crisis onto those groups and spaces most vulnerable to climate change yet consistently blamed for causing, or tasked with remediating, climate change’s effects. Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 629–632

In 2009, the Kingdom of Morocco embarked on the Solar Plan, an ambitious 10-year plan to become a leading solar power producer. This paper examines the genesis of the first project in the plan, a concentrated solar power plant near the pre-Saharan city of Ouarzazate, in order to explore the “energy transition” as a political as well as geographic project. I specifically address how the government's acquisition of land drew on colonial strategies for dispossession that were subsequently embraced by the post-colonial state. At the same time, bureaucratic processes for responding to community demands effectively narrowed popular opposition to a set of technocratic problems to be solved by development interventions. The official discourse of global environmental remediation obscured the socio-ecological relations at work in the project, constructing the land as marginal so as to facilitate investment and foreclosing resident's broader political claims. Attending to the political...

De nombreux mouvements pour la souveraineté alimentaire et de nombreux programmes de développement ont mis en avant le rôle des agriculteurs familiaux dans la mise en oeuvre de pratiques agricoles durables. Cependant, une telle approche fait face en pratique à de nombreux défis dans les oasis du Sud-Est du Maroc. La plupart des chercheurs et des décideurs s'accordent sur le fait que ces oasis sont soumises à des pressions environnementales et économiques sans précédent. Dans ce contexte, le potentiel de l'agriculture oasienne reste limité. Cet article examine l'histoire récente de l'agriculture familiale dans la vallée de M'Goun (province de Tinghir) pour proposer une perspective alternative sur ce type d'agriculture. Cet article se fonde sur une étude de cas pour étudier les changements profonds de l'agriculture d'oasis durant plus d'un demi-siècle. La façon dont les agriculteurs ont intégré des nouveaux impératifs économiques et techniques dans ...

In 2009, the Kingdom of Morocco embarked on the Solar Plan, an ambitious 10-year plan to become a leading solar power producer. This paper examines the genesis of the first project in the plan, a concentrated solar power plant near the pre-Saharan city of Ouarzazate, in order to explore the ‘‘energy transition’’ as a political as well as geographic project. I specifically address how the government’s acquisition of land drew on colonial strategies for dispossession that were
subsequently embraced by the post-colonial state. At the same time, bureaucratic processes for responding to community demands effectively narrowed popular opposition to a set of
technocratic problems to be solved by development  interventions. The official discourse of global environmental remediation obscured the socio-ecological relations at work in the project, constructing the land as marginal so as to facilitate investment and foreclosing resident’s broader political claims. Attending to the political dynamics surrounding solar power
challenges assumptions that an energy transition necessarily involves a transition away from an environmentally destructive carbon-based economy—or from the forms of governmentality that support current energy regimes.

This paper examines the recent history of peasant farming in a Moroccan oasis to reflect on the relationship between agrodiversity, labor and tradition in contemporary smallholder systems. Many agrarian scholars and food sovereignty activists emphasize the role of peasant farmers in protecting agricultural biodiversity. This paper argues that certain kinds of agrodiversity may in fact be ‘new', a product of recent agrarian transformations that adapt and in some cases reject agricultural traditions. Ethnographic research in pre-Saharan Morocco found that some households used migration remittances to experiment with new crops and produce for the market for the first time. In recognizing the ambivalent relationship peasant farmers may have towards tradition, this paper contends that it is important to locate a political economy of agrodiversity in the larger context of the contemporary agrarian question and to relate agrodiversity to the changing labor regimes that enable peasant farming systems.