The King's call for a new development model explained: What is integrated regional development?

In his 2025 Throne Day speech, King Mohammed VI called for a decisive shift from “traditional approaches” toward a model of integrated regional development, declaring what became a widely shared phrase: “no place for a Morocco moving at two speeds.”

He laid out four immediate priorities that include regional job creation, equal access to health and education, proactive water management, and rehabilitation projects connected to national infrastructure.

At the heart of the speech was a challenge to the country’s uneven development map. Growth, investment, and services remain concentrated along the Casablanca–Tangier axis, while inland provinces trail far behind.

So what’s wrong with Morocco’s current development model?

Today, development is largely organized by sector. The transport ministry builds roads. The health ministry builds clinics. The agriculture department launches irrigation projects. But these actions often happen in isolation, without coordination, so a road may lead nowhere, a clinic may sit far from the populations that need it, and a dam may not serve surrounding farms.

This is where integrated regional development (IRD) comes in. Instead of planning projects ministry by ministry, IRD starts with the territory itself: What are the region’s strengths and constraints? What combination of infrastructure, services, and jobs can unlock growth locally?

Under IRD, different investments work in sync. A single road might connect farmers to markets, students to schools, and health workers to clinics. Social services and economic projects are bundled in one plan, not scattered across separate ministries.

What does IRD look like in practice?

The United Nations describes IRD as multidisciplinary, participatory planning that brings urban and rural areas onto the same map. It balances population and economic activity, linking infrastructure, education, healthcare, environment, and disaster preparedness into one spatial strategy.

One of the most striking examples is Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project. What began in the 1970s as a dam-building effort became a full regional transformation, adding power plants, irrigation canals, schools, roads, and farms under one coordinated plan.

Electricity generation jumped, cotton yields doubled, and rural towns gained access to basic services. By 2023, Şanlıurfa province had seen incomes rise from under $1,000 in the 1990s to nearly $5,000.

Countries like Vietnam, Indonesia, South Africa, and EU members have adopted similar frameworks, coordinating infrastructure and services to reduce inequality between booming cities and lagging rural areas.

Morocco’s regionalisation push laid the groundwork, but stopped short

Since adopting a new constitution in 2011, Morocco has focused on advanced regionalisation, creating elected regional councils and transferring limited powers from Rabat to local governments, by putting in place legal and financial structures  to enable decentralised decision-making.

But while these reforms empowered local councils on paper, they didn’t address one critical flaw: national ministries still manage their budgets and plans in isolation.

What would integrated regional development mean for Morocco?

An IRD approach would change both how money flows and how development is designed. Instead of each ministry submitting separate project budgets, funding would be pooled into regional envelopes, drawing from health, agriculture, water, and infrastructure lines.

Take Draa-Tafilalet, for example: under IRD, a single plan could fund a small dam, irrigation canals, rural clinics, and an agri-processing zone, all under one joint financing mechanism.

This shift would likely require new structures for pooled funding. Morocco’s Regional Investment Centers (CRI) or a retooled INDH framework could serve this role, overseen jointly by the state and elected regional councils.

But money isn’t the only thing that needs rethinking. Rather than ministries in Rabat deciding where to place a road or clinic, each region would conduct a territorial diagnostic: What natural assets and constraints shape this area? Where is the population growing? What are the existing service gaps?

That diagnostic would shape the investment map. For example, a road in Béni Mellal would be placed not just based on traffic volumes, but on whether it connects farmers to packing facilities, schoolchildren to classrooms, and neighborhoods to clean water sources.

Success would be measured by impact, not outputs

Currently, each ministry tracks its own metrics: kilometers of road built, schools constructed, clinics staffed. But IRD demands a shift toward territorial performance dashboards, measuring how regions are actually doing on outcomes like job creation, poverty reduction, access to services, and environmental resilience.

The King’s 2025 speech also pointed to local engagement as a cornerstone of this new approach. For IRD to work, regional actors, cooperatives, firms, training centers, NGOs, must shape development from the ground up.

“I have asked the government to adopt next-generation local development programs based on making the most of local specificities. I expect it to ensure that advanced regionalization is firmly rooted, and that the principle of integration and inter-regional solidarity is observed.”