Squaring the Circle: Individual Rights and Collective Property in Rural Morocco
Episode 224 Squaring the Circle: Individual Rights and Collective Property in Rural Morocco This project examined changing norms regarding pooling and material obligation within Moroccan households and families. It does so in the midst of a political economic shift from agrarian production to a mix of informal wage labor and rentier/remittance economies, one with profound influence on practices of collective pooling in villages and in families. How have changes in individual access to income influenced how people share wealth and risk, and how they allocate these shared resources? I examined divergent understandings of a moral and ethical obligation to contribute to shared pools, and to provide for others in two collective contexts: rangeland commons and household budgets. Shared ownership of collective grazing commons has become a live issue in many communities in the Middle Atlas Mountains as rights to these lands became, for the first time, alienable to outside investors in 2019. Hi...
