CCAS Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Karen Rignall talks about her study of land tenure in rural Morocco, and offers some surprising insights into what land means to the people. CCAS Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Karen Rignall talks about her study of land tenure in rural Morocco, and offers some surprising insights into what land means to the people.
Interview by Gavin Schalliol
On April 2, 2013, CCAS Qatar Post-Doctoral Fellow Dr. Karen Rignall presented her research on land tenure in rural Morocco to the Georgetown community. One of Dr. Rignall’s MAAS students, Gavin Schalliol, interviewed her about her fieldwork, and where that research is taking her.
How did you first become interested in land issues in Morocco? What led you to your current research?
I have long had a strong thematic interest in the processes of rural economies across the Middle East and North Africa, especially regarding the changes they have been undergoing in response to the globalization of agri-food systems. All these issues of large-scale land acquisitions, debates between practitioners and theorists, land tenure reform and rollbacks thereof have particular salience in Morocco. I was also quite interested in the rural dynamics of southern Morocco because I had previously worked there on rural livelihoods issues. I thought there were a lot of questions surrounding access to land and many of these questions had long escaped development policy.
How has the past year at CCAS informed and aided your research?
When I did my graduate work, I worked mostly with Africanists, so being able to situate my work within the context of Middle East Studies was particularly helpful. CCAS has a tremendous depth of scholarship, and being around people who are working on different dimensions of the Middle East has reconnected me to the wider field. In particular, being able to ground my scholarship in the field of Middle East Studies alongside Political Ecology and Agrarian Studies has really helped me contextualize my work. In addition, some of the symposia and speakers organized by CCAS have been a great help as well.
Why do you think land issues are such a hot-button issue in Morocco?
I think it is a combination of the juridical legacy from the colonial and immediate post-colonial period as well as some of the changes that have been happening over the past few decades, such as integration with European Union markets and concomitant increases in high-value agricultural exports and investment. But it also relates to inequities in the country that were products of colonial expropriation and a long neglect of smallholder agriculture. Unlike most countries in the Middle East and North Africa, there was never a substantive program of land reform following independence, so Morocco has seen continuing concentration of land ownership and increasing marginalization of smallholders. I think Moroccan policymakers recognize these problems, but even though there is a lot of official recognition, there is very little room to maneuver within the vestigial legal and economic structures left over from colonialism and they are very difficult to unravel.
One especially striking theme in your recent CCAS lecture was the distinction you drew between commonly accepted idea of ”common land” and the socially defined idea of communality. Could you elaborate on that a little bit and talk about how the two come into conflict in Morocco?
This is an important theme in the literature on common property. The way the commons exist in real time and space is always more complicated and compromised than a theoretical consideration of common property. States and organizations have come to appropriate the use and application of the term ÛÏcommonsÛ in ways that often have little resonance to people as points of common identity, common management, or common governance. In the absence of real governance authority, collective ownership can become a hollow juridical construct. In this context, popular notions of communality are frequently based in ideas of reciprocity, subsistence rights, and a concept of justice that is grounded more in how the community works together rather than ownership structure. Communality includes ideas of responsibility, identity, and modes of action.
What sorts of issues are obscured by the development community’s focus on accepted ideas of common lands?
Although I think my research is directed more toward the academic scholarship than policy, I think it does have something important to say about the contemporary operations of land tenure. Though the World Bank and other international development organizations now recognize that giving individual land titles to farmers is not the solution to rural poverty, there is still a lack of subtlety and understanding when it comes to their efforts to recognize and codify customary regimes. People in southern Morocco, for instance, are resisting collective land ownership not because of a desire for privately held land, but because they want to challenge corruption in communal ownership regimes in favor of more transparent government practicesÛÓand that can mean a mixture of private and collective governance. People think very creatively and are able to entertain multiple systems of land tenure, and I think that development policy has some difficulties acknowledging that formalizing or simplifying land law is sometimes good but can also hurt the most marginalized groups.
It is important to remember, for example, that land involves juridical complexity anywhere you go. Even in the United States, where private property is supposedly sacrosanct, a vast number of overlapping domains can occupy the same space. The US has vast tracts of developed federal lands that contain concessions given to resource extraction such as timber and oil. Municipal zoning and eminent domain affect the way land is used. Deed-restricted developments such as gated communities contain very strict limits on what can be done on private property. Every country, including Morocco and the US, will have its specificities, but no system of land tenure, even private property, will be divorced from collective management regimes.
In what directions do you see your research going in the future?
I am hoping to continue my research next year on some of the solar energy work and some of the land work. Another interesting direction that some of my work has taken is looking at provincial iterations of the human rights movement and the way it has forged linkages with land issues. There is a very active human rights infrastructure in Morocco, and it has begun to bring together different groups that have not interacted before ÛÒ people who are experiencing issues with land and basic social justice and are beginning to frame their issues in a human rights light.
Finally, I think it is important to remember that in the face of all these pessimistic accounts of the rise of globalized industrial agriculture at the expense of smallholders, rural livelihoods have proved to be remarkably resilient. Despite concentration in the global agri-food system, smallholders still provide the majority of the food for their regional markets. In Morocco, they have deployed a number of strategies to hold onto their land, including the widespread investment of remittances from Europe (especially France) in agricultural land. This, in fact, was another reason for the increase in land values over the past several decades. If you look at these developments solely through the lens of development policy, you will miss a lot of what is going on.