This paper examines impacts of water inaccessibility and contamination on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. By focusing on the Oslo period to the present, I evaluate why the Joint Water Committee (JWC)—the water management body created under Oslo Accords II (1995) designed to function for five years but operating over 15 years past its expiration date—has facilitated Israel’s perpetuation of the water crisis by omitting consideration of Gaza’s water resources from its mandate, and failing to provide equitable water access for the West Bank. I focus on international law violations regarding water access and quality, specifically water, refugee, and humanitarian law including the UN Convention on the Law of the Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses and the Fourth Geneva Convention, Protocol I. The occupation facilitates “hydrological apartheid”—the Israeli state exploits its position as the Occupying Power to dominate Palestinian water resources (Zeitoun 2011). Only 25% of Gazans have daily access to running water, resulting in a health crisis including exorbitant rates of childhood kidney disease. Gaza’s sole aquifer will be irreparably damage by 2020, cyclical military invasions have decimated the water infrastructure, and climate change is increasing drought and aquifer saltwater intrusion. Diversion of West Bank water to settlements leaves 50,000 people with the minimum levels recommended by the World Health Organization for “short-term survival in an emergency.” This paper fills critical gaps in the study of the Occupation and Israel’s settlement-expansion approach by providing up-to-date analyses through the lens of water access. I address: what are the ongoing connections between the West Bank and Gaza water crises? Transnational comparative analysis addresses why the UN has readily defined cases such as government water shut-offs in the US city of Detroit as human rights violations, though Palestine is denied this classification. Building on work by scholars including Weizman, Gordon, Roy, and Selby, this paper analyzes proposals to mitigate looming water catastrophe in Gaza, including recent developments in desalination, as well as proposals to integrate Gaza into the Israeli water network, while examining which interim solutions are complementary to ending the Occupation—ultimately the only sustainable resolution to the water crisis, now in deeper jeopardy as the Trump administration emboldens Israel’s right to legislate expansive illegal settlement-building, worsening the Palestinian situation as the Balfour Declaration’s 100th anniversary approaches. The paper draws on my ethnographic interviews with civilians in the OPT, and with JWC, UNRWA, and NGO representatives.

It is well documented that Palestinians suffer from unequal access to water and sanitation vis-a-vis Israelis, and that this is an important undercurrent of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. This presentation explores the political ecology of water inequities in looking at the social implications of intermittent water supply for three communities: an urbanized refugee camp, an agricultural community in the northern West Bank, and a smaller community in the northern West Bank. The presentation describes the dynamics of water availability (or lack thereof), the household, gender and labor implications, and the efforts of local Palestinians and Palestinian aligned institutions to implement technologies and other adaptations, including appealing to international norms and treaties, to mitigate the negative implications of limited supply. The result is a much more dynamic picture of multiple levels of everyday struggle for the most basic of resources in a place where water use and distribution has been contested for decades. Interruptions of household water supply have been associated with three factors, growing physical or economic water scarcity, failing infrastructure, management capacity, and political water inequality. I combine analysis of statistics with insights from listening sessions with Palestinian water industry professionals in three regions of the West Bank to address the political ecology of community and household water supply in the West Bank. I find that while there is a constant overlay of Israel’s control and limitations of water sources in the West Bank, this broad condition is then exacerbated by ecological, technical, and local managerial conditions that create differing local realities in actual Palestinian communities. The impacts of these conditions at both the community and household level are discussed. The presentation will discuss the global policy and research implications not just for Palestine, but throughout the middle income nations of the Middle East, where intermittent supply remains a significant issue.

Using Turkey’s Kura river basin as an ethnographic case study, this paper asks how multilateral projects in transboundary water management attempt to integrate transnational, national and local actors in project implementation, and under what conditions they are able to do so. The Kura river basin, located in northeastern Turkey and the South Caucasus, is the most important watershed in the region in terms of surface area, water flow, freshwater ecosystems, and socioeconomic importance. The basin is threatened by transboundary water management problems, including flooding and drought, depletion of groundwater reserves and water pollution. I attempt to explain the process of multi-level water resource governance in the Kura by considering the influence of an external set of powerful actors influencing negotiations among levels of stakeholders, and thus the management of resources: organizations which comprise the international development community. My work pays particular attention to the role of local communities in transboundary water projects, and how development organizations attempt to incorporate local actors in project implementation. Because the literature on Turkey and transboundary water resource management has overwhelmingly focused on the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the critical role of Turkey in the Kura river basin has been characterized by scholars as understudied and barely considered. In light of Turkey’s plans for hydropower development in this basin, and the potential impact on water flow and pollution levels for downstream communities, the lack of studies on the Kura is a major gap in studies of transboundary river basins in Turkey. Building upon literatures in contemporary Turkish studies (Turkey’s regional cooperation on water and resource management), comparative political science (transnational actors and state-society relations), and critical development studies (development project implementation and evaluation), my political ethnographic study demonstrates that for implementing transnational development projects at the local level, the existence of strong local civil society organizations is not a sufficient condition. Rather, project support by mid-level bureaucrats at the national level is the unexpected link to incorporating local actors in project implementation. Without “champions” in the mid-level bureaucracy to endorse the project and act as knowledge and power brokers between local-level stakeholders and development professionals, international development projects in resource management are unable to establish sustained collaboration with local actors in project implementation. At the same time, obtaining the support of mid-level bureaucrats has the paradoxical effect of solidifying institutional arrangements which impede transboundary collaboration on resource management, limiting the perceived effectiveness of water-related development projects.

Women are actively engaged in the irrigation sector in Egypt but their contributions tend to be poorly understood and undervalued both by land owners (typically men in their own families and communities) and also by irrigation engineers and extension agents. Women’s labour contributions to irrigation tend to be marginalized due to misperceptions of lack of physical strength or technological ability, sociocultural norms that deem it to be inappropriate work for women, and because women are always perceived as ‘helpers’ rather than as workers or cultivators. A survey was administered to 100 men and 100 women in the Old Lands of Egypt, which were originally cultivated by the inundation of the Nile River. An equal number of unrelated men and women were surveyed in the New Lands, which became cultivable after the construction of the High Aswan Dam. The survey was conducted to understand the labor contributions made by women and men on 1) their own family farms, 2) as hired laborers and 3) on local water governing bodies. The survey also collected other sex-disaggregated data to understand irrigation problems faced by farmers, the types of information farmers needed from irrigation specialists, perceptions of women’s contributions to irrigation, and the usefulness and impact of irrigation innovations. Survey data was complemented with interview data from 10 semi-structured interviews in the Old Lands with water engineers and other officials responsible for irrigation. The interview questions were aimed at understanding the interactions of these officials with male and female cultivators in the region. We discovered that women contributed their labor to irrigation in 78 percent of the total of 400 households surveyed. We also found that the diffusion of certain irrigation technologies such as drip and sprinkler systems in both the Old and New Lands has made irrigation a more socially acceptable task for women although women had also been irrigating land long before these new technologies and innovations became available. Findings from this study indicate that women are far more actively engaged in irrigation efforts in Egypt, and possibly in the wider MENA region, than is generally thought to be the case. Their contributions should be acknowledged and made more visible in research and policy circles. This paper is a modest contribution towards doing so. Keywords: technologies, gender, irrigation, social norms, Egypt

My project investigates attempts to produce neoliberal subjectivity amongst the peasants in the Gezira Agricultural Scheme—the largest irrigated farm in the world under a single management—in northern Sudan. Following falls in global cotton prices in the 1960s, it examines attempts by the World Bank to increase agricultural efficiency on the Gezira Scheme in the 1980s by producing farmers as “entrepreneurs” through the enactment of newly-dominant neoliberal ideas about agricultural development (particularly those proposed by the Chicago School). Following these World Bank reforms some 40,000 farmers have found them themselves in debt; the entire Gezira Scheme is on the brink of disintegration. Through a combination of ethnographic and archival work, I investigate how mass indebtedness emerges as—not just an economic relation but—a mode of political subjectivation, notably an ostensible political quietude in a region known for decades for its strong unionisation and communist activity. But this political subjectivation has in turn engendered its own forms of resistance. I place this subjectivation and resistance in the context its long-standing echoes in Sudanese history and, particularly, its traces in the late 19th century Mahdist uprising which, too, was predicated on new forms of indebtedness emerging following the Ottoman-Egyptian occupation. In doing so I seek to situate the “neoliberal moment” in terms of a longer history of credit and debt relations on the Gezira plain. My project also presents an alternative genealogy to present-day understandings of “human capital” as the homoeconomicus of neoliberalism. Largely portrayed as a Western figure, with incomplete and distorted translations and iterations in non-Western settings (including the Middle East and Africa), I investigate how the concept of human capital originally emerged within the field of development economics and in relation to theorising the role of poor farmers in development. In doing so, I ask how ideas about the peasant as “human capital” were subject to early experimentation by the World Bank through the agricultural reforms it implemented on Sudan’s Gezira Scheme in the 1980s. I investigate the ramifications of these experiments—and the mass indebtedness produced—as they have played out in the Gezira plain today, producing the counter-point to the West’s “indebted man”: the “indebted peasant.”