Local coordination stories: Impasse, adaptation and emancipation A synchronic analysis of collective actions in irrigated agriculture in Morocco

As a Mediterranean country, Moroccan agriculture is highly dependent on the whims of the sky. Social peace is the corollary of a good harvest and the risks of rebellion and disobedience increase with water stress. If irrigation in Morocco has a secular past; in the oases, in the Atlas valleys and around medieval cities, modern irrigation dates back less than a century but continue to be a driven force accelerating profound social, economic and political transformations. Many authors have eminently decrypted and documented those transformations trough many approaches and dimensions. Geographers, sociologists, hydraulic engineers, looked into the hydraulic question in Morocco; the 80s were very productive and a revival of interest followed in the 2000s with an abundant scientific literature. In this thesis, our purpose is to produce a conceptual framework trough revisiting this literature and questioning it from the perspective of local coordination modes and multiple sources of power. The objective of this research is to understand through which mechanisms, and in which context, local coordination can initiate and support processes of emancipation of local communities and rehabilitation of rural territories often left on the margins of technical and economic progress. Collective action is quite often attributed with the virtues of success and overcoming community difficulties in relation to one or more common goods. In the present research, we will examine these dynamics in order to better characterize them and go beyond the objective function of collective action to try to situate the analysis on other non-conventional dimensions (cf. the contribution of social psychology, political sociology). This work is based on case studies that we have observed and continue to do so over the past fifteen years.