Gender, pastoralism and intensification: Changing patterns of resource management in eastern Morocco

Today's growing concern about global environmental consequences of cumulative land-cover change, particularly agricultural intensification and land degradation, challenges geographers to address the complexities of local scale land-use systems. This dissertation examines how gendered resource management affects and responds to ecological and socio-economic changes associated with agricultural intensification and sedentarization of Beni Guil pastoral nomads in eastern Morocco. These new land-use practices sustain a growing human population but also accelerate land degradation, which threatens the long-term productivity of these rangelands and livelihoods that depend on them.; Geographic research in livestock raising regions of the world generally addresses the question of landscape change through analyses of regulatory institutions at the community scale. Yet this approach ignores women's resource management interests, which are strongest at the household level. Guided by feminist political ecology, this dissertation highlights the importance of recognizing multiple user-groups and overlapping resource rights and demonstrates how gendered management of livestock and rangeland resources accommodates socio-political change and economic development at the regional scale.; Quantitative data analyses, combined with qualitative and participatory research methods, demonstrated that gender roles, class variables and household mobility influenced how pastoralists combined traditional land uses with modern techniques and commercial resources for the most economically beneficial result, despite negative social and environmental outcomes. Unlike previous gender-based studies that emphasize women's social and economic losses, this dissertation highlights the variations in gendered benefits and losses associated with new resource management strategies along the continuum from mobile to settled and from subsistence to commercial livelihoods.; This research on land-use and land-cover change is important for conservation and agricultural development policies in Morocco, where 64 percent of the land area is classified as rangeland and where half of the working population derives its livelihood directly from agriculture and/or livestock raising. The Beni Guil raise approximately one million sheep and goats annually and are among Morocco's most important livestock producers. A better understanding of household level land-use decisions, specifically changing gender roles vis-a-vis the management of livestock, water and rangeland resources, compliments existing meso-scale research and conservation efforts and thus contributes to sustainable development initiatives in the region.