Abhatoo - Centre Nationale de Documentation

Morocco has launched several transformative adaptation options (TAOs) to address climate change (CC) risks in their agricultural and water sectors.
As part of the CGIAR Initiative on Climate Resilience (ClimBer), Morocco was one of six countries selected to pilot a framework assessing how multiscale polycentric governance (MPG)—which involves an improved coordination of institutions across sectors and scales, along with TAOs—could enhance the impacts on rural welfare through an impact pathways approach.
The study considered three TAOs : shifting to highvalue tree crops, contract farming and public-private partnerships, and converting to drip irrigation with system modernization.
The conceptual framework mapped 22 MPG elements (exogenous variables) and 30 impact transmission domains, linking TAOs (endogenous variables) to rural welfare through a system of 30 recursive equations. By using stakeholders' perception data on a scale of 1 to 10 from 178 respondents in the Oum Er Rbia River basin, and simultaneous regression estimation techniques, the study found that :
• Shifting to high-value tree crops is the preferred option, with a dominant share of total impacts across impact transmission domains, followed by contract farming/public-private partnerships, and drip-system conversion. However, given their strong functional relationship, implementing them together could bring large benefits.
• The MPG factors, particularly structural institutions and private actors, exert a significant influence on TAO performance, with the greatest effect observed on agricultural productivity, production, and sectoral performance transmission domains.
• Policies targeting all MPG domains that predominantly affect impact transition variables will have considerable spillover benefits on other domains, such as policy goals for enhancing farm and labor income, food availability and prices, and water security.
• Among the impact transmission domains, productivity and production contribute the most to food and income security. Since cultivated area and cropping pattern transmission domains significantly influence productivity and production, policy interventions targeting these domains can enhance food and livelihood security.
Therefore, prioritize policies targeting MPGs and TAOs that significantly impact transmission variables and select complementary policies that target these variables to generate higher impacts on the intermediate policy goals of food, livelihood, and water security, as well as the final policy goal of rural welfare.