A vibrant literature has addressed how colonial, settler-colonial, and geopolitical ambitions contributed to changes in water use and agricultural development in the Middle East through the 20th Century. The second half of the 20th century bore witness to a dramatic increase not only in irrigated, but export oriented modern agricultural systems – undergirded by narratives (socio-technical imaginaries) of modernity, economic prosperity, and liberatory development associated with post-colonial nation-state development. This paper asks how these imaginaries are changing in the context of climate change, political instability, and economic disruption. Climate change has led extreme heat, extended droughts and other climatic events that have significantly impacted agricultural production and the feasibility of irrigation, as well as exacerbating domestic water scarcity across the region. Further, political instability has coincided with declines in economic conditions for average people across the region, and the combination of global economic instability and the disruption of supply chains for food and other basic goods. In this context, new socio-technical imaginaries have emerged and are being enacted that promise technological solutions in the form of wastewater reuse, and desalinization, on the one hand, and increased attention to efficiency on the other. Through discourse analysis of regional environmental, water industry and trade publications and science media in major English and Arabic language news outlets in Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon, this paper investigates the construction of new socio-technical imaginaries of water and development. Preliminary findings indicate that new sociotechnical imaginaries present the maintenance of societal well being as being made possible through adoption of new desalinization and wastewater treatment and reuse technologies, as well as increased attention to water use efficiency at the household, community, and national levels. At the same time, there is increased attention to a socio-technical imaginary (forwarded by Israel and the United States) of water technologies as tools to incentivize collaboration (“water for peace”). This occurs even as there is more attention to human right to water frameworks that call for water equity and expose the fallacies in the imaginaries of water justice through new water technologies.