Layering and perpetuating: the logics of conservative reforms in Morocco’s irrigation policies

Since the 1980s, Morocco’s irrigation policies have displayed a puzzling combination of multiple reforms and of deep policy continuity. To make sense of these contradictory patterns, we start by reconceptualising four decades of change as the successive layering of three distinct policy regimes (laissez-faire, delegation, and integration) on top of the older modernisation regime dating back to the colonial era. We show that layering had the – partly unexpected – effect of sustaining the legitimacy of modernisation policies in the face of multiple pressures for change. It did so through three mechanisms: the co-optation of international donors; the blurring of responsibility for socially harmful outcomes; and the opportunistic relegitimisation of modernisation policies enabled by this blurring. Our case thus contributes to emerging theorisations of the conservative effects of policy layering. It also has implications for broader understandings of regime-wide transformism, of which sector-specific conservative layering might well be a key modality.