The West Asia North Africa region is often defined by its environment, with much of the research and policies surrounding managing environmental resources and issues are framed as demography vs. geography. This is also fueled by narratives and imaginaries that WANA environment, climate, and resources, characterized by sprawling deserts and arid landscapes that are unused and unusable and need to be controlled and transformed in order to have value. Much of this stems from colonial imaginaries that have laid the base for policies and practices utilized to dispossess rural communities and nomadic tribes and limit resource access and control. Despite claims of ongoing development projects, rural communities and especially those in the arid steppe (Badia) continue to face poverty and marginalization. Attempts at sedentarization and shifting livelihood structures from agriculture and pastoralism to military and government employment were initiated in many of these locations only to be rolled back with the neoliberal turn leaving many families unemployed and unable to return to their traditional lands and ways of life. The encroachment of development agencies and private investments into parts of the Badia for tourist, mining, and agricultural development renewed tensions around land and resource access, environmental justice claims, and competition over livelihood opportunities. As such, many communities struggle with inter- and intra- community conflicts and sense a loss of traditional solidarity and reciprocity relations. These dynamics are not unique to WANA or Jordan, they feature in many post colonial contexts. In the region however, very little is understood of the conditions and realities of rural and Badia communities, especially when it comes to researching local knowledges, informal institutional dynamics, tribal relations, and livelihood and resource strategies within these communities. Despite the similarities between the challenges facing Badia and rural communities and other indigenous community struggles, they are rarely discussed as part of the lager indigenous struggles happening around the world. In this presentation, I will outline some of these tensions that complicate locating and understanding indigenous knowledges, struggles, and resistance in Jordan and center on questions around why Bedouin communities in Jordan continue to be marginalized, state and tribe/ community relations, and the role that colonial and post-colonial environmental imaginaries play in modernization and development agendas and their impact on Bedouin and rural communities. Keywords: Marginalization, Rural Resistance, Jordan, Bedouins