Project description
Water recommoning and governance in North Africa
Managing water in North Africa means navigating a perfect storm of climate crises, historical divides and competing political agendas. To find a path forward, we must analyse how traditional water systems can drive equitable, community-led resource management. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the RECOMMON project will answer this question. It will explore how communities in semi-arid regions of Morocco and Tunisia reclaim collective control over water through traditional infrastructures such as cisterns and khettaras. It examines recommoning as a material, symbolic and discursive process, moving beyond conventional commons theory. The project’s overall goal is to support more sustainable approaches to managing water resources in climate-vulnerable regions.
Objective
Water governance is deeply political in North Africa, where climate change converges with postcolonial marginalization and resource depletion. Traditional infrastructures such as cisterns in Djerba (Tunisia) and Khettaras in Tafilalt (Morocco) remain vital for daily life and collective memory, yet are increasingly mobilized by diverse actors—from communities and NGOs to state agencies, donors, and heritage institutions.
This project investigates how recommoning—the process through which communities reclaim collective control over resources—emerges around traditional water infrastructures in semi-arid North Africa. It advances three research objectives: (1) to conceptualize recommoning as a discursive, symbolic, and material process, moving beyond institutionalist approaches to the commons; (2) to document how local actors frame and practice recommoning through cisterns and Khettaras; and (3) to assess under what conditions these infrastructures sustain collective governance or, alternatively, become co-opted by external agendas of the state, market, or heritage industries.
The project combines discourse analysis, ethnography, and co-production workshops to capture imaginaries, practices, and governance outcomes. By bridging political geography, commons scholarship, and critical water governance, it delivers theoretical innovation, grounded empirical insights, and policy-relevant recommendations. Beyond academia, RECOMMON engages communities in shaping knowledge about water, while informing adaptation and heritage policies in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Ultimately, it reframes traditional infrastructures not as relics of the past but as living socio-ecological systems offering lessons for equitable and sustainable water governance in water-scarce regions worldwide.
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2025-PF
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24129 Bergamo
Italy
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