Advanced regionalisation gave Morocco’s regional councils a development programme, a budget of their own, a project execution agency, and a place among the competences shared with the State on energy, water and the environment. Since then, regions have been receiving the same request from lenders, ministries and their own elected members: an energy-climate roadmap. Many have commissioned one. Few have applied one. The difference is not the quality of the study. It is what the study was asked to do.
First, list what the region actually holds
A Moroccan region does not generate electricity, does not set tariffs and does not issue the authorisations of Law 13-09. There is no point building a roadmap on levers it does not hold. It does, however, hold several things nobody else holds.
- A multi-year investment budget and the regional development programme that schedules it. A measure that is not in it does not exist.
- Assets: buildings, vehicles, equipment, sometimes land. This is the perimeter where the region can act without asking permission, and the only one where it can set an example with verifiable figures.
- Regional land, or the ability to ease access to land, which is the first request of every renewable energy developer.
- The power to convene. Bringing the provinces, the communes, the regional directorate of the grid operator, the energy efficiency agency and the territory’s industrial firms to the same table is something no other institution can do with the same legitimacy.
- A regional project execution agency that can act as contracting authority.
The roadmap is built from that list. What lies outside it is advocacy, which is legitimate, but is not a plan.
A diagnosis that gives orders of magnitude
The diagnosis is where roadmaps get bogged down. Everyone wants a complete emissions inventory, down to the commune, with exact emission factors. The data does not exist at that grain, and the region ends up with a two-hundred-page report, two years after launch, whose figures are already disputed.
A useful diagnosis answers four questions in three months: how much energy the territory uses and in what form; where emissions concentrate, by broad sector; how much of all that depends on regional decisions; and where the territory is exposed, to drought, heat and water scarcity. To answer them, start from the data operators already hold, accept the approximations and document them. A dated, sourced order of magnitude is worth more than a disputable decimal.
Two distinctions belong at the very start. First, the territory’s emissions and the institution’s: the region is not accountable for both in the same way. Second, energy and water: in Morocco, agricultural pumping, desalination and water transfers are heavy electricity loads, and an energy roadmap that ignores water misses part of its subject.
Choose little, and hold to it
A document listing eighty actions signals that none was chosen. An applicable roadmap keeps three to five measures and, for each, answers three questions: who carries it, with what money, by what date.
Measures fall into three families that must be kept apart. What the region does itself, on its own assets and with its own budget: energy retrofits of regional buildings, solar on the sites it operates, the vehicle fleet, lighting of the facilities in its care. What the region makes possible for others: providing land, supporting communes, a single desk for industrial firms seeking to contract renewable electricity. What the region asks of the State and the operators: grid reinforcement, national programmes, funding. The first family proves credibility; the second delivers most of the results; the third must not fill the document.
Each measure kept is costed and written into the regional development programme. A roadmap that lives alongside the programme and the regional spatial plan is one more document. A roadmap that feeds them becomes a policy.
Governance that survives the elections
A regional term lasts six years. An energy-climate pathway is measured over fifteen. The monitoring arrangement must therefore be designed to be taken over by a council that did not vote for the plan.
In practice: a steering committee chaired at political level, whose secretariat is held by a technical unit of two or three people attached to the administration, not to the president’s office; few indicators, published every year, computable without a new study; a mid-term review that allows a measure that is not working to be dropped, which is the mark of a living plan, not of a failure.
Money: start with your own
Waiting for climate finance before starting is the surest way not to start. The regional budget, programme contracts with the State and loans from the municipal equipment fund, the FEC, are enough to launch the first measures on the region’s own assets. It is those first, measured results that make a region audible to international financial institutions and climate funds, whose territorial programmes readily finance a dynamic already under way, and rarely an intention.
Five roadmaps that end up in the cupboard
- The one written without the finance director, in which no measure has a budget line.
- The one with no baseline, so that nobody will ever be able to say whether it produced anything.
- The one that lists actions belonging to the State, and waits.
- The one that ignores water.
- The one delivered at the end of the term.