A sign heralding the coming sustainable development

in Morocco, a modest action of this kind may have taken place 32 years ago, though at the time, without the yardstick of history to gauge its importance, it seemed as big or grand as any good deed. What came out of it, with a ripple effect for me and for the people of the region - marked by a signpost that was no longer needed and still stands, now rusted - was a guide and an inspiration along with encouraging national policies from which we can trace the following decades of community-determined projects.  

In 1992, a group of Peace Corps volunteer biologists was assigned the task of inventorying the natural life of Morocco's national parks, including its largest and oldest protected area (at the time) in the heart of the High Atlas Mountains: Toubkal National Park. Members of the village of Aroumd told Brian Gay of the Peace Corps that hikers climbing to the top of Mount Toubkal, the highest peak in North Africa, were unaware that they were passing through the village cemetery, a sacred and solemn place where shepherds never grazed their flocks.  

They asked the park administration, under the National Water and Forestry Agency, to install a sign telling visitors not to cross the remains of the deceased. The Park Administration complied with this request, of course, and so began the now well-established path of community-park collaboration, development with neighbouring communities in the nation's national parks and forests, and much more.

I arrived in Morocco the following year and, fortunately, my Peace Corps assignment coincided with Brian's. I internalised the lessons of the Peace Corps. I honestly internalised the lessons of his experience and that signal, coming to understand the needs that communities identify and express and the responsibility of development agencies to respond accordingly. This basic principle of sustainability is so simple, yet it has taken decades for previous generations to abandon the destructive control of centralised planning in favour of citizens making decisions as they affect their lives.  

In 2000, I founded the High Atlas Foundation, a Moroccan American organisation committed to development aid that is fully responsive to Moroccan communities. What the High Atlas Foundation has become can only reflect Morocco's irrefutable commitment to sustainable development and its pursuit through participatory community-based approaches. In the early 2000s, shortly after King Mohammed VI's accession to the throne, Morocco's own framework for reconciliation and national unity was driven by self-expression and recognition. This process was followed by a liberation of civil society to define and carry out its missions in ways that promoted livelihoods, public health, and the natural environment.

In 2004, women's empowerment was further codified at the national level, and now more legal entrenchment of gender equality is taking hold. Morocco's National Initiative for Human Development was created in 2005. It is a multi-million-dollar source of funding for local development projects in all sectors. It explains that sustainability depends partly on natural resources, but also on social, cultural, economic, historical, geographical, financial, and technical factors. It is therefore called to be designed in an inclusive way, with the community at its centre, to bring all these critical perspectives to bear and to generate benefits also in this range of areas.  

The nation's municipal charter obliged locally elected officials to create participatory development plans by and for the people, putting in place short- and long-term projects that reflect the common will. The 2008 Roadmap for Decentralisation committed national administrative structures to empower subnational levels and forge public-private partnerships to achieve locally determined development projects and goals.  

The 2011 Constitution mandated the nation's greatness in diversity and its opportunity to grow individually and collectively. Moroccan multiculturalism is a historical, celebrated, and compliant reflection of normal daily life, and the nation sees this beauty and rightly seeks its dynamism to lead it towards sustainable human development.  

South-South, Maghreb and African unity are also pillars of Moroccan society and major national priorities, understanding that regionalism in this sense is not only essential for shared prosperity and security (including environmental), but is also a key stepping stone to securing the transformative benefits of globalisation. Morocco's commitment to renewable energy has reached global benchmark status.  

The signal in the village of Aroumd was for many people a first sign of the kind of Moroccan leadership that was increasingly on the horizon. The projects realised since then, and hopefully soon to be realised, continue to share this core concept of community, with good intention and strategy to improve people's lives. With this infinite potential it is also a reality that implementation remains unsatisfactory for most people, in rural areas and most acutely in mountainous areas, where the world's poorest conditions are concentrated.  

Participatory methodology or activities have not been uniformly applied, although we can train ourselves to apply them effectively in real community settings and help individuals and groups to know what they are looking for above all and to pursue the projects that will bring meaning to their lives. People's own methods of analysis, prioritisation, and action planning, linked to their most intimate interests, also necessarily reflect local characteristics, cultural norms, and relative conditions. In other words, they must be adapted to or born out of the society of the beneficiaries of the development experience.  

Adding to the challenge of training methodologies is the creation of widespread experiential learning programmes for people from all levels of society, agencies, sectors, businesses, and locations who interact with or come from the beneficiary communities. For example, the National Water and Forest Agency seeks to have all forest rangers in the country trained in participatory facilitation planning and empowerment approaches to engage communities in their self-development. They are needed to catalyse and assist these processes to the point where projects are designed, implemented, evaluated, improved, replicated, and scaled up, and meet Morocco's overall intention: community-driven national sustainable development.  

As overwhelmingly and urgently needed, yet possible, as this undertaking is, so too is flexible financial provision that meets the diverse needs of local communities as they see them. For example, help is needed to effectively address the climate crisis and to increase the resilience of communities to economic shocks and natural disasters before, during and to rebuild in their aftermath.  

Securing vital funding is the challenge of launching community development movements with people's shared determination and support for their projects - never a smooth, linear process, but one that requires sincere consensus if there is to be sustainability. Most development donors set their own criteria for what they support with their funding, but this may not be fully in line with the most important priorities of communities.  

From an anodyne announcement, a national development vision and a well-established international model that is remarkable to people inside and outside Morocco. Purposeful travel is a gift, especially when it meets the struggle of poverty that runs so deep. Hopefully, this Moroccan story will soon include a culminating chapter in which its participatory model of sustainable development for all will be a rooted signpost to guide nations on their journeys towards the fulfilment of people.

 Dr Yossef Ben-Meir, sociologist, is president of the High Atlas Foundation in Morocco.