Beyond Morocco’s Green Success Story: Analysing Actor-Interests and Deforestation under the “Strategy 2020-2030 Forests of Morocco”

Morocco’s reputation as an African role model for sustainable development and climate action is widely supported by progressive environmental policies, strong representation, and close partnerships with international donors. This paper critically examines why – despite limited tangible results, most notably, persistent deforestation and social challenges – Morocco continues to capture substantial development financing for forest, social, and economic policies aligned with global green development ambitions. The analysis focuses on a recent forest policy – the ‘Strategy 2020-2030 Forests of Morocco’ – as a case. It draws on a theoretical framework combining actors’ formal and informal interests and Edelman’s theory of symbolic politics. Political actors are driven by both formal and informal interests, the latter explaining how they may continue to benefit from policies despite gaps between discourse and outcomes. Further, Edelman’s theory of symbolic politics suggests that actors employ symbolic reassurances to conceal failures and advance these informal interests. Combining interviews, field observations, grey literature, and deforestation data, we demonstrate that the Strategy functions as a gateway for foreign actors to showcase engagement in their sustainability agendas and ergo caters to their strategic interest to legitimate access to energy and migration control on the Moroccan level. Further, the Moroccan forest administration leverages the Strategy for fund acquisition and project supervision. However, Hansen’s global forest change dataset indicates that deforestation more than doubled in the five years after the Strategy’s release in 2020, compared to the previous five-year period. Nevertheless, narratives of the leading actors are centred around the Strategy’s success, tangible mostly at administrative levels, as it enabled collaborations, set relevant goals, and attracted funding. We conclude that, rather than substantive improvements, strategic interests drive international acclaim and donor engagement. As the success narrative camouflages the perpetuation of sustainability issues, like deforestation and structural barriers to civic participation, the dynamic mirrors aspects of Edelman’s ‘symbolic trap’, namely ‘symbolic reassurance’, ‘persistence without tangible results regarding ongoing issues’, and ‘weak opposition’. This interest-focused analysis calls for a more critical assessment of policy impacts in the presence of success stories.