2025/11/21 by Laurent Beduneau-Wang, Majda Soumane · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Education and Islamic Studies #Islamic Finance and Banking Studies #North African History and Literature
paper · doi:10.1080/00076791.2025.2555428
openalex publication_date 2025/11/21 · openalex created_date 2025/11/23 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
While archives are common in developed countries, it is generally recognised that they are lacking in developing countries. To cope with the challenges faced by a 500-year-old water irrigation system in a semi-arid region in the south of Morocco, we demonstrate that the absence of archives invites methodological exploration, making the invention of new sources, especially visuals, inevitable. They serve as mnemonic devices for keeping track of community water management infrastructures. Documenting actors’ reconstruction of organisational memory reveals new memory categories: communal, community-based, common, and historicised memory. Inspired by the eight principles of Ostrom’s theory on the commons, our case study also shows that the governance of commons cannot last beyond one generation without a process of organisational re-membering. Organisational re-membering, as the ninth principle of the commons theory, induces memory as well as a renewed community membership.