In 2009, the Kingdom of Morocco embarked on the Solar Plan, an ambitious 10-year plan to become a leading solar power producer. This paper examines the genesis of the first project in the plan, a concentrated solar power plant near the pre-Saharan city of Ouarzazate, in order to explore the “energy transition” as a political as well as geographic project. I specifically address how the government's acquisition of land drew on colonial strategies for dispossession that were subsequently embraced by the post-colonial state. At the same time, bureaucratic processes for responding to community demands effectively narrowed popular opposition to a set of technocratic problems to be solved by development interventions. The official discourse of global environmental remediation obscured the socio-ecological relations at work in the project, constructing the land as marginal so as to facilitate investment and foreclosing resident's broader political claims. Attending to the political dynamics surrounding solar power challenges assumptions that an energy transition necessarily involves a transition away from an environmentally destructive carbon-based economy—or from the forms of governmentality that support current energy regimes.

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We integrate qualitative and quantitative methods to document the long-term impact of international migration remittances on household investment strategies, wealth outcomes, and equity of asset ownership among households in a Moroccan oasis valley. In the early 1960s, nearly 80,000 Moroccan men from the south-eastern oases left their families to work in French coal mines. Anthropological fieldwork shows that this migration event initiated decades-long streams of steady income in the forms of remittances and pension checks. Accompanying household-level empirical analysis shows that this afforded the migrant-sending households a foothold in the 'new' economy: Households invested in vocational training, secondary schooling, and business ownership at rates higher than their nonsending counterparts. Migration also hastened the transition of households out of the 'old economy' -land and livestock ownership declined for migrant-sending households, particularly those owning more land. We also document that the migration event was unusually open -work in the coal mines was open to virtually anyone -meaning that the recruits came from across the entire class-and economic spectrum. The combination of an unusually low entry cost and the resultant provision of a large and long flow of cash meant that overall, migration was an equalizing force in the economy.

This paper explores rural poverty through a relational lens, arguing that new spatial patterns of poverty stemming from global economic transformations call for a relational approach; one that draws attention to the importance of global integration while recognizing that places are absorbed differently and unevenly into circuits of capital accumulation. The spread of neoliberalism has reconfigured rural spaces, and the production of poverty knowledge reinforces this uneven spatiality. We address recent literature extending the critical analysis of poverty and welfare in the Global North to the production of poverty knowledge and development practice globally. We examine the various technologies of power that ask the subjects of rural poverty to be empowered, moral, and market‐oriented subjects. This attention to how rural poverty is governed and how rural subjects are inserted into the project of development highlights the distinct role of rural spaces in relation to poverty studies. We emphasize the spatially and temporally disjointed ways in which rural spaces and subjectivities are reconfigured, calling for greater attention to ethnographic accounts of the lived experiences of poverty. We argue for a reconsideration the “global rural” in processes of uneven development.

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