This paper employs the methods of historical political ecology to trace the emergence of Lebanon’s environmental regulatory apparatus. By tracing the historical emergence of the institutions and infrastructure that manage wastewater treatment, potable water, and agricultural inputs like pesticides and fertilizers, the paper demonstrates how these institutions contribute to the durability of Lebanon’s present ecological catastrophe. It argues that the conditions of their establishment in the decades following Lebanon’s state-building period of the 1950s was structurally enmeshed in what Karim Eid-Sabbagh terms Lebanon’s international development complex, the overlapping and unequal web of relations among international funders and Lebanese institutions that produces environmental governance in Lebanon. As mediators of capital flows, these regulatory institutions were central to establishing a pattern of organized abandonment across Lebanon’s rural margins. That entrenched pattern, along with particular incidents of regulatory failure, was critical to producing the two most significant issues of environmental justice in contemporary Lebanon: the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion, and the catastrophic pollution of the Litani River basin.