Synopsis
In Morocco, neither the economic elite nor the ruling regime deny climate change or its catastrophic impacts. Despite Morocco’s minimal contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions (it contributes around 0.2% of global emissions[1], official documents are replete with references to ‘sustainable development’, ‘the transition to a green economy’, ‘green growth’, and ‘decarbonisation’. Yet long before these terms became mainstream, the ruling classes pursued industrialisation, beginning with the progressive government of the late 1950s, which sought to build an independent national economy free from the legacies of colonial rule.
After the resolution of the political struggle between the monarchy and the left of the bourgeois nationalist movement, represented by the National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP), the state turned to the public sector to lay the foundations of a Moroccan industrial base. This strategy was deliberately limited to light manufacturing and aimed at nurturing a local bourgeoisie. The state adopted measures such as protectionism, import substitution, and the ‘Moroccanisation of Companies’ law, while prioritising access to foreign markets, particularly in Europe, through an export-oriented growth strategy.
The approach to financing this development model lay at the centre of the political conflict. Once the monarchy consolidated its control over political power, it relied heavily on external debt and indirect consumption taxes to fund this model. In practice, this shifted the financial burden of developing a dependent local capitalism onto the popular classes, while the Moroccan and foreign bourgeoisie benefited from this exploitative economic system.
A crisis in capitalist accumulation emerged in the late 1970s, driven by declining global phosphate prices, the rising costs of the Western Sahara War, and a critical surge in external debt. In 1983 the World Bank and IMF imposed a Structural Adjustment Program, which marked the first signs of deindustrialisation in Morocco, yet the dream of industrialisation persisted. In 1989, Le Monde published a striking article titled ‘Morocco, a New ‘Dragon’ at the Gates of Europe’.
Over the two decades after the Structural Adjustment Programs, and amid the transition of power from King Hassan II to Mohammed VI, the state adopted a new wave of industrial policies centred on sectoral strategies in which the ‘new global professions’—such as automotive manufacturing, aerospace and electronics—were prioritised. The underlying premise was that generous incentives for foreign direct investment would attract international capital, advance industrialisation, and diversify the country’s productive base.
In 1983 the World Bank and IMF imposed a Structural Adjustment Program, which marked the first signs of deindustrialisation in Morocco, yet the dream of industrialisation persisted.
These strategies evolved through successive five-year cycles of revised targets and requirements. Neither the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, the Eurozone crisis of 2013, nor the COVID-19 shock of 2020 altered their overall direction. Instead, these disruptions reinforced the resolve of the state and big Moroccan capital to continue along the same path: an export-driven growth model focused on attracting foreign investment and further embedding the country into global value chains.
The state adopted an intensive public investment strategy to attract foreign direct investment, channeling substantial resources into infrastructure, including industrial free zones, highways, rail networks, airports and telecommunications. It also sought to improve the business climate by making labour laws more flexible, thereby reducing labour costs, and stimulating investment through tax breaks, fiscal advantages, and grants.
By the end of the 2010s, several reports warned that this development model had reached its limits. These concerns began with a 2017 World Bank report, were echoed the same year by the Economic, Social and Environmental Council, and culminated in an April 2021 report issued by the royal commission tasked with outlining a ‘new development model’.
The conclusion was stark: despite sustained efforts and Morocco’s integration into global value chains, the country remained non-industrialised. This reality was often obscured by terms such as ‘weak productivity gains’, ‘limited job creation’, and the ‘middle-income trap’. Two reports, one from Bank Al-Maghrib and another from the High Commission for Planning, clearly demonstrated that this was the case. Despite high levels of public investment relative to other countries in the region, these policies had not resulted in genuine industrialisation. In 2019, Bank Al-Maghrib noted the ‘weakness of private investment despite the many incentives offered’, and Chakib Benmoussa, chair of the royal commission tasked with designing the ‘new development model’, stated publicly: ‘Neoliberalism has failed us and fallen short of expectations’.
Such statements, however, did not signal any intention to abandon neoliberal policies. After the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, and despite official documents invoking concepts such as ‘domestic-demand-driven growth’ and ‘industrial sovereignty’, the core economic strategy remained unchanged: attracting foreign investment, expanding exports, and deeper integration into global value chains.
In the early 2020s, following the COVID-19 pandemic and the ensuing economic shutdown, Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2022, and the European Union declaring its commitment to pursue carbon neutrality by 2050, debates on ‘green transition’ and ‘green growth’ resurfaced with renewed urgency. These discussions had begun in the late 2000s, when Morocco launched the 2009 Sustainable Energy Strategy and issued a series of policy documents and strategies. The official documents and initiatives are discussed throughout this study. The numerous official documents and initiatives are discussed in detail throughout the study.
The state adopted an intensive public investment strategy to attract foreign direct investment, channeling substantial resources into infrastructure, including industrial free zones, highways, rail networks, airports and telecommunications.
Like most of the literature of international institutions, this literature on the ‘transition to a green economy’ and ‘low-carbon economy’ treats carbon reduction as the central strategy for the transition.Yet greenhouse gas emissions are only one expression of capitalism’s destructive effects. Extractivism, export-oriented agriculture, reliance on private transportation, and policies aimed at stimulating private investment, particularly foreign investment, remain the pillars through which the state promotes a so-called green or low-carbon economy.
The state’s official literature follows the blueprint promoted by international financial institutions, chiefly the IMF and the World Bank, for implementing industrial and green policies. Under this framework, the state should intervene only when markets fail or cannot perform their functions. Its role is thus confined to strategic and regulatory tasks, while primary responsibility for development, including sustainable development, is assigned to the private sector. Public funds are used to stimulate private investment, with the state intervening only until targeted sectors become profitable. Once profitability is achieved, the state is expected to withdraw through mechanisms such as privatisation, public–private partnerships, or so-called ‘innovative’ financing tools. This approach reiterates the core tenets of neoliberal doctrine and the long-standing Washington Consensus.
Even the so-called achievements in renewable energy and carbon reduction warrant close scrutiny. Morocco remains heavily dependent on external energy sources, importing around 90% of its energy needs, while the private sector has increasingly become the dominant actor in the sector. Serious doubts also surround the reported progress on emissions reduction. Multiple studies suggest that the decline in projected emissions reflects slower economic growth in the 2010s relative to earlier forecasts, rather than any substantive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Beyond state-issued documents and initiatives on green transition, the Employers’ Federation published the Moroccan Climate Business Initiative 2017–2018. The central bank, Bank Al-Maghrib, released a document in November 2016 titled Financial Sector Roadmap for Contributing to Sustainable Development and Combating Climate Change. More recently, the OCP Group announced its Green Investment Programme for 2023–2027. Across these initiatives, however, the competitiveness of Moroccan enterprises often takes precedence over environmental objectives. Indeed, the debates around reducing carbon emissions are driven more by external pressures than by a substantive ecological agenda. The European Union’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050, along with measures such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, has raised concerns about potential loss of access to European markets, prompting the state to encourage Moroccan exporters to adapt to these requirements by publicly committing to climate targets.
Extractivism, export-oriented agriculture, reliance on private transportation, and policies aimed at stimulating private investment, particularly foreign investment, remain the pillars through which the state promotes a so-called green or low-carbon economy.
This official interest is also driven by a relentless pursuit of climate-related funding. Nearly all sectoral plans, whether related to public services, social policy, women’s inclusion in development or more recently climate goals, are contingent upon securing external funding. This financing, however, is most often provided in the form of loans rather than grants, increasing public debt and reinforcing one of the very constraints that undermine the achievement of these goals.
Civil society initiatives, such as the Moroccan Association of Green Economy for the Environment and Climate Justice, as well as research institutes and think tanks like the Policy Center for the New South, address policy-makers with proposals that largely reinforce the same state-led perspective described above. By contrast, the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and for Citizens’ Action in Morocco (ATTAC) Morocco is explicitly critical of neoliberal globalisation, a stance consistently reflected in its activities, campaigns, and publications. Trade unions remain largely absent from these conversations, despite the central role of the working class in any green transition, whether in bearing its costs or driving its implementation.
The current debate is shaped by a global context marked by the ‘return’ of industrial policy in response to climate change. A new consensus on climate action has led to the adoption of industrial policy packages, largely based on subsidies and incentives, aimed at stimulating the technological development and production required for decarbonisation. This shift reflects an acknowledgment that climate policy cannot succeed under strict neoliberal orthodoxy. In the Global North, however, it has not taken the form of comprehensive industrial planning, but rather of new regimes of tariffs and subsidies. The environmental dimension has thus become entangled with broader geopolitical conflict between the United States and its allies on one side, and China on the other, evident in ongoing trade and tariff disputes involving the United States, the European Union, and China.
Morocco’s ruling classes seek to establish themselves within this global context, adjusting economic policies in the hope of benefiting from the worldwide turn toward green industrial strategies.
At the same time, this global context is one of the main obstacles to advancing any green industrial strategy. The structure of the world economy, dominated by Western powers and China, leaves countries in the Global South, including Morocco, with little room to pursue green industrialisation. What is often presented as an ‘opportunity’ for green industrial policy may prove illusory without a genuine break from global markets. Such a move would require a process of disengagement from economic and political dependence on the powerful states, multinational corporations, and financial institutions that control global markets.
This perspective is entirely lacking from the official literature produced by the Moroccan state and its institutions. Their plans continue to reproduce the international division of labour, where Morocco is constrained to the structural dependency established under colonial rule in the early twentieth century. Morocco is still expected to specialise in the supply of raw materials and agricultural products to global markets, as its so-called ‘competitive advantages’ – a strategic location, political stability, and cheap labour – are used to attract assembly activities within global value chains, where Morocco remains positioned at the bottom. Despite official claims that the country has become an ’emerging power’ and that its export structure has shifted toward a higher share of manufactured goods, numerous studies reach the same conclusion: there is much that is ‘Made in Morocco’, but very little that is truly ‘Made by Morocco’.
Dependency is not the only obstacle to achieving green industrialisation. This dependency is compounded by Morocco’s current (ruling) class composition and social structure. That structure enables a segment of the local bourgeoisie to wield significant influence, particularly large importers who have benefited from trade liberalisation and accumulated wealth. For these actors, industrialisation poses a direct, existential threat.
Morocco faces the question of how it can achieve structural economic transformation and attain industrialisation in a way that enables it to transition from a developing economy to a sustainable, industrial one? The obstacles remain largely unchanged: dependency, external debt, weak private investment, limited access to finance, and constraints on technology transfer. These issues are repeatedly identified in official policy documents, national initiatives, academic studies, private-sector publications, and reports issued by international institutions.
Politics is at the heart of this debate. Decades of neoliberal policies and practices have sidelined elected officials, political parties, and social organisations, and replaced them with experts, consulting firms and international financial institutions. Yet any effort to industrialise Morocco, particularly in a green sense, requires restoring the centrality of politics and shifting from an economy that serves the interests of the wealthy few to one that serves society as a whole and safeguards the environment for future generations.
Industrial policy broadly refers to state intervention to guide economic activity and drive structural change. The concept of ‘green industrial policy’ has gained prominence by emphasising the integration of environmental objectives into industrial policies.
What is often presented as an ‘opportunity’ for green industrial policy may prove illusory without a genuine break from global markets.
While industrial policy implies state intervention in the economy, the dynamics of capital are often left unexamined. Capitalists do not invest with structural transformation, national development, or sustainability as primary objectives. Their decisions are driven by returns, risk minimisation, and the pursuit of rapid and high profits.
Structural transformation, national development, and sustainable growth are driven by state-led ‘public policy’, which regulates and directs economic activity within a broader national plan. Such plans pursue objectives that extend well beyond the calculations of capitalists and have underpinned every successful historical experience of industrialisation.
The long-standing neoliberal claim that the private sector alone can drive development in the Global South contradicts historical experience. Today’s advanced economies relied on a strong state, including the use of protectionist measures, to develop the forces of production and achieve structural transformation.
At the same time, the state should not be seen as possessing an inherent capacity to deliver such transformation. Structural change requires broad political and social mobilisation rooted in working people, including the working class, small-scale food producers, and people affected by worklessness, especially women and oppressed minorities. The experiences of Latin American countries over the past three decades offer a useful analytical lens for understanding the forms and possibilities of such popular participation.
The fundamental sources of wealth are nature and human labour. Yet for centuries, capitalism has reduced both to mere factors of production, recasting them as ‘human capital’ and ‘natural capital’ and subjecting them to relentless exploitation and depletion. Historically, human resistance placed limits on this extractive logic. Today, it is also constrained by the planet’s biophysical limits. Capitalism responds by suppressing mass resistance, in part through bolstering the rise of the far right, while simultaneously seeking to adapt to the ecological crisis it has produced through market-based mechanisms, transforming even proposed environmental solutions into new opportunities for accumulation. These dynamics unfold amid escalating military conflicts, a global arms race, and the accelerating militarisation of world politics.
In this context, debates on green industrial policy have re-emerged alongside renewed efforts to address long-standing structural challenges, particularly in the Global South. The central question is how to build an industrial base capable of moving these economies from economic backwardness, dependency, social deterioration, and ecological collapse. The aim is to chart a path toward a future in which people can live with dignity while safeguarding the environment. Achieving this requires industrial policy that is sovereign, just, and genuinely green.
Sovereign industrial policy means that economic choices are determined by national and popular will rather than by external pressures or the policy agendas of international financial institutions and powerful trading blocs. It requires reclaiming the capacity to decide what is produced, how it is produced, and for whose benefit. This implies breaking with both established and emerging forms of dependency and ensuring that development strategies reflect popular priorities rather than the demands of global markets.
A just industrial policy entails securing a dignified life for the working population. It acknowledges the social costs that often accompany major structural shifts, such as withdrawing from certain industries in favour of others. It also ensures that these costs do not fall disproportionately on the most vulnerable. It places the interests of local communities at the center of policy-making, rather than treating them as secondary to aggregate growth objectives.
Structural change requires broad political and social mobilisation rooted in working people, including the working class, small-scale food producers, and people affected by worklessness.
Further, an industrial policy that centers the environment requires moving beyond a narrow focus on decarbonisation to confront all forms of ecological harm, including extractivist practices (such as mining) that degrade land, water and ecosystems. It rejects the notion that ‘green’ capitalism or carbon removal alone can resolve the climate crisis, as both ultimately reproduce the same system by supplying it with new sources of energy and profit alongside fossil fuels. Instead, it calls for a fundamental transfiguration of the economic order.
This vision demands concrete and actionable recommendations, as well as practical tools for engaging with ongoing social struggles and forms of popular resistance. It must link people’s immediate needs to a longer-term project of economic transformation and a just ecological transition through the following measures:
1) A public industrial policy that serves as the backbone of the green transition. Such a policy must not shift its costs onto workers or local communities and should be subject to democratic oversight by citizens, labour organisations and affected populations. Its financing must rely on mechanisms that do not further entrench dependence on either traditional or emerging imperialist centres.
2) An energy policy that prioritises supplying the domestic market with clean and affordable energy. Reclaiming energy production and distribution under public control would enable the implementation of a green energy strategy, one that supports national industrialisation while reducing structural energy dependence.
3) A robust public transportation system is essential to any meaningful green industrial strategy. Such a strategy cannot be achieved without a substantial expansion of clean, publicly powered transit. This must be accompanied by a fiscal framework that imposes higher taxation on private vehicles, along with increased interest rates on consumer loans used to finance their purchase.
4) Achieving genuine food sovereignty is equally central to any industrialisation strategy. Expanding industry requires a coordinated increase in food production and agricultural raw materials. Food sustains a growing urban population, while raw materials supply the factories that drive industrial activity. Meeting these needs demands an agricultural sector equipped with adequate machinery and equipment, including tractors, harvesters, threshers and fertilisers. Any coherent industrial strategy must therefore direct substantial investment toward strengthening the agricultural base. By contrast, opening the economy to automobile manufacturers in search of cheap labour and infrastructure merely turns the country into an assembly platform, exporting vehicles while most profits accrue to corporations based abroad.
5) Fiscal policy must also be transformed. This entails restructuring the banking and financial system into a public sector governed by institutions subject to democratic and civic oversight. Such an approach contrasts sharply with the current arrangement, in which the central bank operates independently and beyond parliamentary scrutiny, and commercial banks systematically favour large borrowers. It also requires pursuing reparations for colonial and ecological debt, enabling the recovery of resources looted by colonisers old and new..
6) Tax policy must hold the rich responsible for the complex economic, social and environmental crisis which they have caused. This requires a progressive tax system, includng a substantial reduction or elimination of value-added tax on essential services, beginning with water and electricity, and markedly higher taxes on the wealthier classes’ income and assets.
7) A robust employment policy that takes into consideration the potential casualties of the green transition. Large segments of the working class fear job losses as environmentally destructive and polluting industries are phased out. Since the capitalist private sector is unlikely to address this concern, a public employment strategy anchored in a socially oriented and environmentally sustainable industrial agenda is essential.
8) These proposals must incorporate a Maghreb-wide viewpoint for the green transition. The fragmentated nature of Maghreb markets deepens the region’s dependence on traditional capitalist centres, such as the European Union and the United States, as well as emerging ones, notably China. At the same time, this fragmentation prevents countries of the Maghreb from benefiting from the potential synergy of their natural resources and productive capacities.
Cooperation would not only strengthen productive capacities and enhance food sovereignty across the region; it would also challenge structural dependence on foreign capital.
Algeria, Libya and Egypt possess significant energy resources, while Morocco and Tunisia hold phosphate reserves and agricultural potential. Algeria’s oil revenues could be redirected toward regional investment to finance productive projects in Tunisia and Morocco, reducing reliance on foreign debt. Conversely, Morocco and Tunisia could supply Algeria with food, lowering its dependence on costly imports from Europe or Russia. Morocco, as a producer of solar energy, could import solar panels from Tunisia, where they are manufactured.
Such cooperation would not only strengthen productive capacities and enhance food sovereignty across the region; it would also challenge structural dependence on foreign capital. Breaking this cycle requires redirecting Maghreb economies away from servicing the needs of the Global North and toward fairer trade relations and shared technological development within the Global South.
9) Finally, democracy must come first. These recommendations, and the broader anti-capitalist vision that underpins them, cannot be implemented by economic elites. These elites benefit from the existing system, which is sustained by an authoritarian political order that likewise profits from capitalist exploitation. Recent electoral breakthroughs in Latin America offer an instructive precedent. There, governments backed by popular movements of workers and peasants have implemented social and economic programmes, despite their limitations and without a full rupture from the centres that impose poverty, unemployment, social misery and environmental destruction on peripheral societies.
We must dare to dream.
- Ali Amouzai – Morocco
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[1]International Energy Agency. ‘Morocco: Share of global emissions’.
