Collective land in Morocco, which makes up roughly one-third of the country’s territory, has been managed by a complex arrangement of statutory, customary, and religious legal systems since 1919. The Moroccan government and international development organizations have repeatedly identified legal asymmetry in land governance structures as a major barrier to rural development. Starting in 2017, a new pilot project administered by the Moroccan government with funding from the Millennium Challenge Corporation is transforming 46,000 hectares of collective land in the Gharb irrigated perimeter into individual freehold tenure over a five-year period. Based on fieldwork carried out from 2017-18, this paper seeks to use the case of collective land privatization in Morocco to broadly explore how the conceptualization of modernity structures acceptable spaces and strategies for rural development. Drawing on interviews with a variety of stakeholders, including Moroccan and U.S. government officials, collective land representatives, and rights-holders to the lands in question, I assert that the Moroccan government’s adoption of a particular conception of modernity within the development sphere has shaped the design and explicit goals of contemporary tenure conversion. This conception is based on economic liberalization, emphasizing the role of the market, and formalization of property rights, but the selective engagement of the state with these policy models highlights the pursuit of project outcomes that lie outside of the acceptable spaces for development. By viewing the practice of tenure reform as a space in which rural power relations and the distribution of resource access are negotiated, we can observe how the discourse of modernity and economic development obscures the concomitant pursuit of political objectives. Ongoing interviews with stakeholders indicates broad agreement on the actualization of some explicit project goals, including marketization of land transactions, increased credit access, and tenure security. At the same time, there is a significant divide between how official and unofficial actors perceive the future transformation of agrarian structures, particularly regarding livelihood shifts, concentration of land ownership, and the relative gains of large farmers and agricultural corporations. This project marks a retreat of the state from directly managing collective land, while opening up opportunities for economic gain by politically connected elites and foreign corporations through marketization and capitalization of the agrarian sphere.