Theorizing Sovereignty in Empty Land - Contested Global Landscapes

consultations began in earnest after the project was announced, inaugurating a process of "social
accompaniment" to maximize the benefits for local populations in line with the government's typical
approach to participation. Following the formal presentation of the project in November 2010,
communities began to articulate their resistance, beginning an informal campaign of visits, letter writing,
and public complaints against the way the government was approaching the project. Concerns were varied
and no one publicly declared themselves against it: as one person told me, "some people say this comes
from the King and they want to respect his wishes." But people were concerned about the whether the
project would generate the kinds of jobs and other benefits they had been promised. They were upset that
the proceeds of the sale disappeared into a bank account in Rabat. They wondered why, if "we can help
the whole world with clean energy, we cannot do more to build factories here," improve agriculture and
help people out of poverty in Ouarzazate. And conflicts started to emerge between different fractions and
villages of the ethnic collectivity as communities jockeyed for a greater share of the benefits--the projects
that would be funded as part of the social accompaniment of the population.
The fact that discussions with the communities gathered steam after people began to voice their
complaints should not, however, be read simply as reactive: the approach of bringing in the "population"
to offer a list of priorities and needs after a project was underway was common, particularly in rural areas,
as a way to subsume public participation into the daily operations of government. A process got underway
to catalogue people's complaints and channel them into a social support program. The resulting
development projects were divided into two categories: "direct accompaniment' of the population and
large structural projects. The former included projects amounting to MAD 45 million; 30 million of that
came from the proceeds of the sale and the remainder was going to be funded by the ministries directly.
Direct accompaniment projects included road paving, lining irrigation canals, financing to support local
tourism projects, a youth complex, among others. The structural projects were of another order entirely,
involving the construction of a local hospital, schools with dormitories, dams and other water works to
improve water availability, even an ambitious project to construct a road over the Atlas to the central
plains of Morocco, a more direct route from the current, and very dangerous, road that ran to the
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