Solar extraversion: incumbent interests, foreign capital and the making of Morocco's megaproject strategy

Solar energy is widely expected to decentralize electricity production but lower- and middle-income countries (LMICs) governments can opt for centralized megaprojects instead. In Morocco, decentralized generation and self-production is legalized, but the state, foreign donors, and private investors instead prioritized the Noor Ouarzazate complex, the world's largest concentrated solar power plant. We argue that this outcome is better explained by the political economy of the power market than predispositions of authoritarian or centralized states. Incumbent producers and distributors and their institutional relays blocked reform within a fragmented state lacking adjudication mechanisms. Megaprojects offered the returns of strategic ‘extraversion’: concessional finance and geopolitical standing mobilized for domestic ends, though these returns proved fragile. Against the dichotomy of ‘authoritarian environmentalism’ and ‘energy democracy’, we propose a national-scale political economy sitting between global capital and local impact, and show that the scale of evaluation shapes what counts as success.