Contested flows

An ethnographic contribution to narratives of groundwater over abstraction in the central Jordanian highlands

Bibliographic Data

ID4464679
AuthorsFrederick Wojnarowski (0000-0001-6254-1898, London School of Economics and Political Science, corresponding author)
Year2025
Publication date2025-02-21
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning E Nature and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2514-8486 • E-ISSN: 2514-8494
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/25148486251321331
OpenAlexW4407813560
LanguageEN
References cited44

This article explores the well-researched topic of Jordan's contentious hydropolitics in the face of scarcity from a new perspective: that afforded by an ethnographic case study of the poor and restive rural district of Dhiban in the highlands of central Jordan. Dhiban, well-known for its frequent protests, is experiencing some of the worst water scarcity in the country but remains relatively understudied in this context. The article traces how shifts between an emphasis on financialised demand management and supply-side megaprojects are experienced among small-scale highland farmers and their wider communities. In much of the extant literature, such communities are portrayed as complicit in wider water scarcity, as the failure of the state and its international backers to reduce groundwater over-abstraction driven by highland agriculture is blamed on the rural tribal patronage networks of highland landowners. A different picture emerges through attending to the fate of Dhiban and its farmers, and their attempts to resist and protest their position within Jordan's hydro-social metabolism. From their view, both supply and demand modes of mitigation have been experienced as forms of dispossession, with dire consequences for socio-ecological reproduction. I argue that this is because both rely on subjecting such places to the various hydraulic missions of the state and its international backers through infrastructure, rendering them zones of anticipatory ruination. This process can be conceived as the entanglement of local socio-ecological environments with global capitalogenic flows, that as they channel, transform, pollute, cheapen and consume water, also generate fragility

Abstraction · Epistemology · Ethnography · Geography · Geotechnical engineering · Groundwater · Linguistics · Narrative · Sociology · Water resource management · Anthropology · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Philosophy · Water Governance and Infrastructure · Water management and technologies · Geology

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