Sustainable Development in Morocco: Health, Water, Energy, and Environment

Résumé

By using a systematic-narrative review methodology, the article systematically assesses Morocco's various and interrelated challenges of health, water, energy and environmental sustainability. The study synthesises information from 45 selected resources (2015-2023) such as academic publications, national strategies, and reports from different agencies, and evaluates Morocco’s progress and challenges from the theoretical perspectives of the Water-Energy-Food-Health Nexus as well as polycentric governance. The findings show that despite the implementation of ambitious sectoral strategies by Morocco, their implementation has been constrained due to the existence of institutional fragmentation, lacking cohesion between the sectoral policies, implementation gaps, and the resulting low level of systemic resilience. The primary contribution of this article is to present an integrated governance framework that links territorial planning, cross-sectoral collaboration, and participation by the communities. Furthermore, it is suggested that Morocco’s path to sustainable development will rely more heavily on its ability to construct adaptive, inclusive, and coherent governance structures that are able to optimise the management of competing interests when there are potential trade-offs between multiple sectors.

Classification JEL: I1; O1; Q2; Q4; Q5; R1.

Paper type: Theoretical Research