Blinded like a state: Water scarcity and the quantification dilemma in Morocco

Over the last two decades, the Moroccan state has had to deal with some deeply uncomfortable knowledge regarding mounting water scarcity. This presents governing actors with a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, this knowledge is politically disturbing as it could undermine prevailing hydro-agricultural policies, which are based on the promise of unlimited irrigation expansion. It could also corrode the dominant social alliance built around these policies. On the other hand, accurately quantifying water resources has long been essential for establishing the technocratic legitimacy of the state.

This paper investigates how the state manages uncomfortable numbers that it has either produced or endorsed: an issue rarely addressed by social studies of quantification, but increasingly consequential in the current ecological crisis. Drawing from a literature on the production of ignorance, we highlight contradictory processes of knowledge production and ignorance. We show that Moroccan state hydrologists have dealt with uncomfortable figures by keeping them fragmented in space and time. They have continued to produce innumerable measurements of water scarcity. However, they have done so in an increasingly scattered manner, both spatially and temporally, while studiously avoiding integrating these fragments into updated national estimates.

This uneasy compromise between “seeing” and “not seeing” like a State has so far helped reproduce the “modernizing” social alliance forged around large hydraulic projects. However, its durability is doubtful. Our case study thus raises a number of hypotheses about what the ecological crisis could do to state quantification in many places and in the near future.