By Fred Wojnarowski, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Anthropology, LSE.
At COP28, water was everywhere. COP28 was based on the first UN Water Conference in March, which had itself emerged from the designation of water in 2016 as UN Sustainable Development Goal 6. It featured a water pavilion, a water themed-programme (that included a panel entitled ‘Water IS the Climate Challenge’) and the global stocktake that included 7 references to water scarcity, management and resilience, as part of both mitigation and adaptation. This rise to thematic prominence was rapid; COP27 the year before had been the first to include water in its declaration. Much seems to have changed—at least at the discursive level—since a decade earlier. At COP18, water researcher Jessica Barnes wrote of water’s almost complete exclusion, despite then also taking place in a Middle Eastern host country: ‘the problem for us water resources people is that we work at the ground level’ she was told by a delegate explaining this absence – ‘the more specific you get, the more difficult it is to agree’. Although talk of water scarcity is much more in evidence in international frameworks today, it rarely attains the level of precision required for anyone to disagree with it. As an anthropologist working alongside water professionals and experts in Jordan – a country that has come to define itself as one of the most water poor in the world – the fundamental problem of discussing the social complexity of water systems remain absent in governmental and multilateral policy documents.
The talkability of water, in Jordan and globally, is often partial and patchy, hiding as much as it reveals about water realities. A shortage of potable water is of course a very real and tangible problem in many places, and especially so in Jordan, where official statistics suggest only 61 cubic meters of potable water is available per person per year, well below the UN’s 500 million cubic metre threshold for absolute scarcity. But water scarcity is also central to how many countries, including Jordan, access international funding for development and increasingly for both mitigating and adapting to climate change. This funding ranges from micro-projects for more water efficient agriculture to infrastructural maintenance. However, most funding, and the most loadbearing parts of Jordan’s own climate change and water strategy documents, targets major infrastructural mega-projects, designed to increase water supply, especially desalination and further exploitation of groundwater fossil aquifers, projects central to Jordan’s economic modernisation vision.
An entire ecosystem of water consultancies and experts has developed in Amman to service this policy space, and access developmental funding. Within this ecosystem, water has become ‘talkable’ but only in certain ways. It is seen as a ‘natural’ resource that can be quantified, managed and moved about through apolitical technical expertise. Issues of justice and distribution are of secondary importance to tackling scarcity in absolute terms, usually through megaproject supply-side solutions. The focus is on increasing that average of 61 cubic metres per person per year, rather than in how the total amount is used and distributed, nor is there much appetite for thinking too much about how such figures are reached. This involves placing a particular emphasis on certain kinds of causes for scarcity over others – and on certain solutions. Constructed as a ‘natural’ resource, water can come to seem naturally scarce in an arid landscape; a scarcity exacerbated by population growth (largely driven by forced migration), by transboundary disputes, and by climate change.
In all this, the World Bank and its partners push for water users to be weaned off subsidies and for full cost recovery through bills to become the norm globally, so that flows of investment can follow. However, Jordan’s three state-owned water companies themselves report that slightly more than half of all water goes missing between source and billed user, becoming so-called nonrevenue water, used by unknown human and nonhuman others. This figure, buried deep in Jordanian government water communications, has remained stubbornly high despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent by USAID and other international organisations to address it, and far higher than many countries with far less developed and well-funded water sectors. For all the expertise directed to the problem, basic questions – how much water is going missing, how it is doing so, and what proportion of this loss is through theft – remain seemingly unanswerable, deferred by technical experts to the realm of the ‘social factor’.
My research, following water’s contested flows through various social settings in Jordan, seeks to interrogate the social practices that lie behind quantification of Jordan’s water sector, and to re-integrate them with their wider social and political dynamics. The social realm of water supply and scarcity, I found, is a highly contentious one. Most domestic water is pumped out of groundwater aquifers (whose depth is increasing through over extraction at a rate of 2m per year), and then moved through a system of pumps and manually-operated valves. Each neighbourhood receives a weekly ration during a certain time when mains water is supplied. Residents, especially women, plan their schedules around this, carrying out water-intensive domestic tasks and filling roof tanks for the week ahead. Almost no one I have spoken to in Jordan believes the distribution schedule is fair. The optics are striking – in West Amman some people are lavishly washing their cars, while in poorer informal neighbourhoods in East Amman many live without any legal water connection. Under the same water company in central Jordan, I worked with some families in rural areas who received one or two hours of mains water a week, arriving often in the middle of the night, at a pressure too low to fill roof tanks (requiring the laborious work, mostly done by women, of filling buckets at the tap). These families complained that they were billed the same as families in the capital, Amman, that receive 26 hours’ supply of water at high pressure, while their own wells were drying up because of overextraction. Farmers in this rural district told me they knew the hydrologists were wrong about the depth of groundwater and the way it was interacting with waste water. In both cases, their complaints were ignored.
Water supply in Jordan is not expensive; rather people have problems with the water’s reliability and quantity. Furthermore, both financial and bureaucratic barriers make establishing a new connection difficult, driving those in informal neighbourhoods, where unregistered dwellings or single houses divided into many one room apartments are the norm, to find other ways of meeting their water needs. Unsurprisingly then, these East Amman neighbourhoods are regarded by many water experts I met as a key site of water theft, and certainly I saw and heard of people rigging up plumbing to bypass meters, using a single paid for and registered connection to get water for multiple households, and even, in one case, drawing water from an old pipe that had been ‘decommissioned’ from a USAID project. There is also the problem of faulty, broken or missing meters.
But people in such neighbourhoods rightly point out that they are not the only or main culprits, and indeed major subversions of the water system are far more systemic than these small-scale examples. When the mains supply ends and roof tanks run out, people are driven to buy water from expensive private tankers – a loosely regulated trade that several analyses suggest accounts for a much greater share of water usage than official statistics allow, and in which much of the water comes from illegal sources. This has led to the growth of a large shadow economy of water, outside all official calculations, fed by various illegal ventures. Jordan’s flagship megaproject, Disi conveyor, is now supplying over 100 cubic metres of water to the capital, pumping deep groundwater from the far south of the country to Amman. Several times the main pipeline has been tapped, on one occasion by a professionally-built 500m tunnel. This stolen water was likely sold to tanker companies, and so eventually made its way to consumers, but did not appear in the country’s tight water budget.
Then there is the issue of illegal wells, lowering groundwater levels and increasing salinity. Some are put in by landowners who say they have no choice if they are to keep their agricultural businesses going, but others are used to supply illegal tankers. A considerable investment to drill, these wells can be profitable, and have allowed the expansion into the eastern desert of agri-businesses often owned by families with close ties to the royal family and the political elite. Officials at the Water Ministry told me that the Interior Ministry was reluctant to enforce their backfilling or even metering, as these wells provide economic sustenance in areas of high unemployment and political unrest. Indeed, during waves of protest, illegal well amnesties and land transfers are common. But other rural districts, including one I worked in, face agricultural collapse as a result of the lack of irrigation, as their groundwater resources are dammed upstream for use in the official water system, and as groundwater sinks out of reach of their shallow stone wells. People here reject the water company’s pious injunctions that they are managing water as a common good, according to the principles of Islamic jurisprudence and sound modern environmental practice. For many farmers involved in rural protest groups (loosely called Hirak), water, the foundation of life, is one particularly pertinent site of ‘corruption’, the central issue around which protestors in Jordan have mobilised. For many Jordanians, corruption is not primarily about legality but social justice, and especially distribution. From this perspective, the technocratic management by national bodies of water they regard as belonging to ‘their’ district comes to seem a form of dispossession. It is, to rural protestors of the Hirak movement, a ‘corrupt’ practice of using patronage networks to get away with illegal wells. One elderly woman, battling to keep a smallholding going, complained ‘next to the well, and you die of thirst’.
In such a system, lack of trust is pervasive at all levels. Even policy officials privately told me they suspected water figures to be mostly unreliable (and often produced for international donors), and that they had grave concerns about pervasive corruption, although without making concrete allegations. Another manifestation of this lack of trust is that almost no one (even the very poor) drink tap water, despite the assurances of the Water Ministry that the water is of drinkable quality.
And yet, pointing out these lacunae in water narratives – complicating the story – can seem to be distracting quibbling over details as the world burns. I was challenged recently at a conference on this; isn’t water scarcity a real and worsening environmental problem, regardless of whether the figures are a bit out? Isn’t a focus on corruption and theft just going to discredit Jordan’s water sector, discouraging urgently needed investments? This encouraged me to reflect more widely on the role of ethnographic description, which tends to complicate pictures, and the overall discourse of climate change, which, however imperfectly, seeks to construct a unified message capable of cutting through the noise. Anthropologists are probably more fond of noise than most researchers, through attempting to explore the texture of social life, and are used to working within analytical spaces dominated by overall trends which contain a multitude of contradictory tendencies within them. The view from somewhere ‘on the ground’ tends to encourage a critical attitude to metanarratives, and a commitment to people and issues de-emphasised in official pictures.
More practically, my response to this dilemma is to cultivate a certain humility about the knowability of water and about other socio-environmental systems as they operate at different scales. Such humility makes room for an acceptance of the social complexity that lies behind quantifications, and acknowledges that people who are marginalised in official accounts may have ways of seeing and knowing that technical experts don’t. More broadly, such a humility reminds us that the logic of the megaproject is part and parcel of the logic of capitalist accumulation and financialisation that has driven environmental stress and also made water distribution so unequal. Frameworks that depoliticise and de-socialise water tend to serve those who seek a return on their investments, and thus not only risk perpetuating structurally unfair political economies. They often fail to capture reality, too.
