Rabat
As Morocco’s administrative capital and a showplace for national urban and environmental policy, Rabat has become a hub for flagship development projects and climate-related infrastructure. Its strategic importance means it often receives outsized investment in green public transit, river restoration, and urban renewal, framed as models of sustainable city-making. However, the scale and visibility of these interventions frequently mask underlying tensions between centralized planning and local realities. In Rabat, the impacts of climate-oriented projects often clash with local needs, sparking civic pushback. A prominent case is the Bouregreg Valley Development, a flagship riverfront renewal scheme that displaced traditional fishing communities. Excluded from planning and undercompensated, fishermen formed the Bouregreg Cooperative in 2009 to defend their livelihoods and market access, signaling grassroots resistance to environmentally framed urban agendas that marginalize established economies.
Another wave of activism unfolded in Rabat’s suburbs in 2024, when Indigenous residents of Kish al-Oudaya launched protests against state reallocation of their ancestral territory without consultation. They demanded fair representation, accurate registries of rights-holders, and just compensation, even establishing community organizing bodies to resist dispossession. These mobilizations spotlight how land-based environmental governance is intimately tied to claims of justice and voice. While the Rabat Ville Verte strategy and wastewater irrigation upgrades are presented as modernization efforts, actual consultative processes remain scarce. Nonetheless, the Bouregreg and Kish movements reveal burgeoning civic resilience: Communities are reclaiming agency by contesting exclusionary environmental projects through cooperatives, public demonstrations, and legal claims. These local interventions challenge technical progress narratives, demanding that climate governance be inclusive, transparent, and responsive to the everyday rights of residents.
Errachidia
Errachidia, located in Morocco’s eastern High Atlas Mountains and Ziz Valley, is shaped by harsh climatic conditions and fragile oasis ecosystems that face accelerating pressures from drought, water scarcity, and land degradation. In this context, climate resilience is not merely a matter of top-down planning, but also, it is an everyday practice of survival, adaptation, and quiet resistance rooted in traditional irrigation systems, agrodiversity, and community resource-sharing. While the Moroccan government, supported by the World Bank, has introduced initiatives like the distribution of 200,000 vitro date palm seedlings and supported women- and youth-led cooperatives, these programs build on long-standing local ingenuity. For generations, communities in Errachidia have developed autonomous systems to cope with scarcity, including ancestral irrigation networks known as khettaras, vernacular earthen architecture, and intricate rules of water governance grounded in collective labor and inherited rights. Recent attempts to revitalize khettara networks have rekindled debates about water access, historical equity, and environmental justice. Local farmers and water users are asserting the value of traditional water rights (in other words, entitlements based on past contributions to canal construction) as a counterpoint to newer, often technocratic water management approaches. This defense of territorial knowledge and communal systems is a form of civic resilience that challenges the invisibility of rural adaptation practices in national policy. In Errachidia, climate activism is not marked by protest but by the ongoing negotiation of heritage, rights, and self-determination in the face of ecological precarity.
Jordan
Jordan’s climate governance operates within a context of acute resource scarcity and regional instability. As one of the world’s most water-poor countries, it has adopted forward-looking strategies, including the National Climate Change Policy (2022–2050) and its updated nationally determined contribution (NDC) pledging a 31 percent emissions reduction by 2030, conditional on international support. These commitments, supported by donors such as the Green Climate Fund, prioritize mitigation through renewable energy and adaptation through improved water management and agricultural sustainability.
Community-based initiatives are emerging. The Jordanian Hashemite Fund for Human Development, in cooperation with the Ministry of Water and Irrigation and the German Agency for International Cooperation, has advanced community-based water conservation through initiatives like the Water Wise Women program, which trained over 300 women in plumbing, water harvesting, and household conservation. Meanwhile, youth groups like the Green Generation Foundation have launched eco-literacy programs, organized climate marches, and trained young people to participate in Jordan’s national climate policy processes. Across Jordan, women’s cooperatives are revitalizing traditional crops and permaculture techniques, offering localized responses to climate stress. Examples include the Shuleh Women Cooperative, which markets olives, dairy, and rain-fed produce; the Habak women-led hydroponics cooperative in Dhiban; and permaculture training programs such as the Women’s Empowerment Programme at the Greening the Desert Project. These initiatives reflect a growing civic climate consciousness, even as national planning remains centralized and often disconnected from local realities.
Amman
Amman has emerged as Jordan’s climate action flagship, with its Climate Action Plan setting ambitious targets such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Backed by international donors and global networks like C40 Cities and Local Governments for Sustainability, the city has prioritized electrified transport, stormwater infrastructure, waste management, and green public spaces. However, these high-profile projects are often concentrated in central areas and align more with donor logics than grassroots needs, raising questions about equity and long-term sustainability.
Amman’s climate activism landscape is shaped by a mix of institutional and grassroots efforts. Civil society organizations such as EcoPeace Middle East, Green Generation Foundation, and the Jordan Environment Society lead public awareness campaigns, urban gardening projects, and policy advocacy efforts, often in collaboration with international bodies. While these organizations bring funding and expertise, they also face limitations in autonomy and agenda-setting, especially when their work intersects with politically sensitive urban issues. Youth and student movements contribute actively through campus-based clubs, public events, and digital advocacy. They ensure climate issues remain visible in public discourse but often operate within narrow, safe registers, emphasizing awareness over structural critique. Similarly, local women’s groups and neighborhood committees pursue tangible interventions—community gardens, recycling programs, and reforestation—but their reach is often constrained by limited support and infrastructural disparities.
Tafileh
Located in southern Jordan, Tafileh Governorate is emblematic of the spatial and political margins of the country’s climate and development agenda. Poverty rates remain among the highest in the country, with over 17 percent of residents living below the poverty line and unemployment reaching 23.3 percent in 2023. The National Food Security Strategy identifies Tafileh as the most food-insecure governorate in Jordan. Rich in phosphate and oil shale reserves but lacking basic infrastructure and services, the governorate has long experienced a paradox of resource wealth and developmental neglect. Tafileh has seen repeated protest actions and public objections related to mining, from sit-ins by unemployed residents seeking jobs at Jordan Phosphate Mines Company’s Hassa operations to community and ranger-led opposition to proposed copper extraction threatening the Dana Biosphere Reserve. While these protests rarely use the language of “climate justice,” they represent clear forms of environmental claim-making—demanding accountability, redistribution, and recognition. These movements are often informal and coordinated through tribal networks, university student groups, or local elders rather than registered NGOs.
The state’s response has oscillated between neglect, securitization, and bureaucratic deflection. Protests have occasionally led to promises of job creation or environmental studies, but systemic change has been limited. National climate policies—such as the Climate Change Policy 2022–2050 or the Green Growth National Action Plan—reference sustainable land use and environmental equity, but they do not meaningfully incorporate peripheral regions like Tafileh into participatory planning. Instead, rural engagement is largely instrumentalized through donor-funded rural development projects, so it is often short-term and disconnected from broader ecological or political frameworks.
At the local level, residents and youth have adopted everyday forms of environmental adaptation, including rainwater harvesting, community-led terracing, and informal reforestation. However, these practices are rarely recognized as climate actions within national reporting or donor metrics. This dynamic reflects the broader civic space in Jordan, where Amnesty International has documented restrictive laws and government oversight that limit NGO advocacy and discourage political engagement.
Spatial Disparities in Climate Adaptation: The Urban-Rural Divide and Beyond
While adaptation efforts exist across both urban and rural contexts in the six areas discussed, the logics that shape them often differ in formality, orientation, and degree of institutional embeddedness.
In urban centers, adaptation tends to come in infrastructure-heavy, technocratic forms, often led by state or municipal authorities with donor or private sector backing. These projects typically prioritize visibility, scalability, and alignment with broader modernization agendas. This approach often treats the urban landscape as a platform for demonstrating climate readiness, producing measurable outcomes such as emissions reductions, improved transit systems, or enhanced green infrastructure. However, this same model frequently sidelines citizen involvement, reducing urban communities to passive beneficiaries rather than active agents of change. Even where urban planning rhetoric gestures toward inclusion, participatory mechanisms remain weak or tokenistic.
In contrast, rural and semi-rural areas, while often operating with fewer resources, exhibit adaptation approaches that are more socially embedded and participatory, even when facilitated by government-linked programs or international development actors. The presence of initiatives in Tafileh, Errachidia, and El Minya shows that adaptation in these areas is not absent, but is sometimes shaped by relational governance, where local networks and hybrid institutional arrangements (for example, NGOs, cooperatives, or village committees) become essential to implementation. In some instances, these approaches tend to integrate livelihoods, water, land, and social cohesion in holistic ways, if less formalized or visible within national policy narratives.
What emerges is less a binary of action versus inaction and more a contrast between standardized versus contextualized adaptation paradigms. Official urban responses often draw from global best practices and funding criteria, favoring replicability and impact metrics. Rural adaptation, meanwhile, leans on place-based knowledge and negotiated legitimacy, prioritizing endurance over innovation. The climate challenge for both urban and rural communities is not only spatial but strategic: how to bridge these modes without diluting the specificity of either. A more just adaptation landscape would not simply redistribute projects geographically but would also reconcile institutional scale with community scale, technical design with lived experience, and policy ambition with local capacity. Recognizing this interplay is essential to moving beyond the urban–rural binary and toward a more integrated, equitable version of climate governance.
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