Morocco's Fragmented Land Regime: An Analysis of Negotiating and Implementing Land Tenure Policies

Morocco has a complex land tenure regime that is characterized by legal and administrative plurality. Legally, this is seen in a syncretic system that incorporates French, Islamic, and customary laws. In terms of administration, there are five separate categories of land that are administered in completely different ways: privatized, titled land (melk), religious land endowments (habous), military land grants (guiche), collective land (soulaliya) and state land. The asymmetric nature of land tenure systems in Morocco has been a significant impediment to development, as well as a major source of social strife. This seven-week ethnographic project conducted over the summer of 2015 sought to gain a greater understanding of the contemporary system(s) of land ownership in Morocco, the major issues that landowners face today, and to investigate the extent to which there is a gap between official land tenure policy and the actual practice of owning land in Morocco. Through semi-structured interviews with a variety of stakeholders on the issue of land tenure, this project found that there is significant and widespread discontent with the current tenure regime, and a consensus that Morocco should move forward with titling programs and systems of privatization. However, different stakeholders highlighted potential issues that will arise as a result of titling processes, concomitant with their values and aspects of land ownership that most concern them. Through a series of anecdotes, this report seeks to outline several contemporary issues that landowners face in Morocco, including issues of power and distribution such as concentration of landholding and land grabs, titling and registration programs and related economic issues such as the (dys)functionality of land markets, current inheritance laws, and development rhetorics utilized to promote state power and control over land.