Doctoral Dissertation Research: Expanding Cultivation, Land, and Livelihood Transformations in Southern Morocco

University Of Kentucky Research Foundation, Lexington KY

Investigators

Abstract

University of Kentucky doctoral student, Karen E. Rignall, under the direction of Dr. Lisa Cliggett, will examine the effects of livelihood transformations on land use in arid regions. In arid and semi-arid areas around the world, lands historically used for grazing are increasingly being converted into farmland. This has important implications for the environmental sustainability of arid-lands agriculture, the economic viability of rural livelihoods, and the ways that inequality shapes people's access to productive resources. The research will specifically examine how farmers acquire rangelands for cultivation and how their strategies affect their own livelihood security and the security of other households. The study will take place in a southern Moroccan oasis that lies between the Atlas mountains and the Saharan desert. The research design will focus on case studies of household livelihood strategies in order to shed light on how changes in livelihoods relate to changes in the way people acquire, exchange, and use land. In particular, it will trace the impact of livelihood diversification -- especially the rise of labor migration -- on the differential abilities of households to acquire rangelands for conversion into farmland. A series of semi-structured interviews with a larger sample will test the broader applicability of the case studies. This study will contribute social scientific understanding of how expanded cultivation relates to broader processes of agrarian change. An ethnographic focus on the cultural context of land tenure, social stratification, and changing livelihood strategies will shed light on how expanded cultivation may create new forms of vulnerability among households with reduced access to land. This will have implications for scholarship, policy, and development planning that relate rural livelihoods to land tenure and land use. The research will also contribute to the training of a social scientist.