WATER RESOURCES IN SEMI-ARID ENVIRONMENTS: COMMUNITY MANAGEMENT, USES AND CONFLICTS

The Middle Atlas «water tower of Morocco», seems to lose this status at a steady pace, moreover, it becomes a theater of conflicts around the water resource. The watershed of the Oued Guigou is a typical example of the territories of the Middle Atlas where water is at the origin of violent conflicts between the fraction of Ait Youssi upstream and that of Ait Halli downstream. For a long time, it is presented as a region with an agricultural vocation, the water resource is an important resource, the populations upstream-downstream have adopted a system of irrigation water management, based on customary rules, based both on solidarity. The disruption of this balance and the hardening of conflicts in the last ten years have been sought not only in climatic factors but also in many profound socio-economic and spatial changes occurring. Water management in the area is now facing new challenges: water stress, increasing anthropogenic pressure, but above all, the interference of political parties in the water issue, who sowed selfishness and buried the principles of solidarity between the peoples of the territor