Environmental Taxation, Contractual Governance, and the Ecological Transition in Morocco: Towards a Model for an Ecological Transition Agency

Abstract

Morocco's ecological transition and climate constraints require a reconsideration of the coherence of environmental fiscal instruments, their incentive effects, and the link between revenue collection and green financing. Research on Morocco has mainly documented green taxation, energy-transition incentives and industrial decarbonisation, while the interaction between environmental taxation, information asymmetry, principal-agent theory and institutional governance remains underdeveloped. This paper examines the design of a fiscal governance framework able to align polluters' incentives with public objectives while ensuring traceable financing for the ecological transition. The study follows a conceptual and documentary design. It relies on a corpus of 44 academic, legal, budgetary and institutional references published between 1920 and August 2026, with a focus on 2010-2026, and on an inventory of seven instruments or families of environmentally related levies. The analysis combines a diagnosis of the Moroccan framework, a principal-agent interpretation, thematic coding, and a comparison of three institutional configurations: Sweden, Colombia and France. Results point to fragmented instruments, incomplete direct carbon pricing, a weak link between environmental performance and tax burden, and insufficient traceability between some revenues and green expenditure. They also identify information centralisation, performance verification, contractualisation and public reporting as critical governance functions. On this basis, the paper develops an Ecological Transition Agency model as one institutional option to be assessed against less costly alternatives. The contribution lies in integrating principal-agent reasoning into green fiscal governance and in specifying safeguards against regulatory capture, administrative duplication and budgetary rigidity.

JEL classification: H23; Q56; Q58; D82.

Paper type: theoretical, conceptual and documentary research