New spaces for water justice? Groundwater extraction and changing gendered subjectivities in Morocco's Saïss region

Over the last few decades, changing tenure relations and modernizing agricultural policies have intensified groundwater use and altered cropping patterns in Morocco's Saïss region. Water-intensive crops are sold on regional, national and international markets, producing new material and cultural linkages between hitherto unconnected life worlds, re-shaping socio-natural relations, opening up new possibilities of living and being but also closing off old ones. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork the chapter describes and analyzes these changes and interrogates them from a feminist-justice perspective in order to tease out how prevailing gendered ways of being, working and relating shape and are shaped by new agricultural and groundwater dynamics, in ways that are not always straightforward. This chapter argues that groundwater abstraction and gender relations co-constitute each other: one cannot be comprehended without the other. Complex intersections of class, generation and gender mingle with existing ways of doing agriculture, while new policy directions and market opportunities contingently produce a range of possible farming and water-use configurations. Each configuration comes with different gender arrangements - different options for relating and performing as men or as women. The chapter presents some of these configurations and arrangements, based on people's everyday experiences and engagements with changing groundwater dynamics.