Common Property, Ethnicity, and Social Exploitation in the Ziz Valley, Southeast Morocco

Abstract

"Contrary to much of the accumulated scholarship on indigenous resource management institutions in various parts of the developing world, this paper argues that common resources or property management in the small-scale irrigation communities of the Ziz Valley paints a complex historical situation where ethnicity, power, and religious ideology are employed to exploit the lower social classes. One of the essential claims of this paper is that sustainable and robust long enduring common property institutions can also exist in conflict-ridden and exploitation based communities and that just rules or the concept of law as understood in the West can not be applied to understand some components of common property management in the developing world."