Governing by promises. Water scarcity and rural hegemony in Morocco

Over the last decade, an important field of inquiry has emerged around the notion of promissory legitimation. It focuses less on the fulfillment of collective promises than on their production and reception. This paper aims, first, to foreground its relevance for – critical- policy studies, by highlighting the decisive role that promises can play in the (re)production of hegemony. Second, and more specifically, it seeks to identify some practices of promise adjustment: the everyday strategies by which governing actors adapt, modify and re-assert their promises when their credibility is under stress, in order to reproduce the hegemony of the same groups in society. I explore these practices in the case of an irrigation megaproject in Morocco, where a developmentalist promise is proving insufficient to defuse tensions surrounding future water access. I show that a key adjustment mechanism is to add new promises on top of the first one – in this case, a clientelist promise and a laissez-faire promise. The coexistence of different promises, however, displays the same chronic contradictions as policy in general, with the same attendant limitations in the hegemony it attempts to uphold.