This article probes the capacity of the water user associations in Morocco (AUEA) to strengthen the social and political positions of their leaders. More specifically, it asks whether these leaders thereby gain a new throughput legitimacy, based on election and the claim to represent a group; and an output legitimacy rooted in the regular delivery of a valuable service. To assess it, we study the – still ongoing-planning process of a small irrigated area (300 ha) located nearby Casablanca. At first glance, the project seems conducive to both types of legitimization. Because it is one of the only water user associations in the region, it can plausibly offer its directors a distinctive throughput legitimacy; while their output legitimacy might be enhanced by a project that is technologically innovative, as the water comes from a wastewater treatment plant. Despite these auspicious conditions, we show that the directors have seen their legitimacy weakened, both because of the deep social divisions within the group they must represent, and of the multiple delays surrounding the service delivery. Beyond circumstantial explanations, we identify a structural cause to these difficulties: the tension between a logic of participatory offloading by the Moroccan State, and the simultaneous reassertion of a developmental State that centralizes decisions and concentrates resources.