At the crossroads of extraction and renewable energy: A genealogy of resource frontiers in Morocco’s solar periphery

This essay critically re-evaluates the concept of resource frontiers in Morocco’s solar energy landscape to ask: how does the 800 MW Noor solar installation under construction in Midelt challenge or extend the resource frontiers laid down by the colonial legal and bureaucratic apparatus created to facilitate conventional mining? How are the scalar politics associated with large-scale solar (LSS) in Morocco respatialized through contestations over resource frontiers? I argue that these resource frontiers are persistent but not simple relics or failures of a colonial state that did not quite finish the process of commodifying new resources and territorializing its power in Morocco. Such frontiers are made and remade by the opacity built into legal and bureaucratic frameworks that have been largely maintained post-independence. We need empirical attention to those colonial pathways to comprehensively document the contemporary injustices of energy projects. This article examines the quotidian operations of bureaucratic procedure and legal frameworks rooted in colonial mining legislation as constituting resource frontiers in the peripheral spaces slated for one of the world’s most aggressive renewable energy rollouts.