Over the past decade, Jordan’s southwestern hillsides were transformed by $813 million in private wind power investments under the ambitious national renewable energy development program. This paper analyzes the transformation of Jordan’s wind power landscapes as exemplary sites of utility-scale renewable development that reveal both the possibilities, and limits, of hybrid renewable land use. The central question that this paper addresses is how new renewable investments reconfigure the distributive politics of the Jordanian state, by focusing on changing patterns of land use and accumulation strategies. At the margins of the wind farms, local herders were able to negotiate usufruct rights to maintain access to grazing lands around the wind turbines. Drawing from sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Jordan, this paper reveals the subtle paradox of toiling in the margins: while hybrid land arrangements sustain rural livelihoods for some groups, this partial amelioration permits the expansion of financial architectures that powerfully redirect channels of revenue and accumulation, creating new challenges around the distributive politics of the Jordanian state. As herders move amidst turbines, deserts become farms and marginal lands become global financial assets, illustrating new spatial transformations at the frontier of renewable finance. By illustrating the dynamics of changing land relations and legal-financial architectures, this paper contributes more broadly to interdisciplinary dialogue around the dynamic social, material, and economic relations that support state-making and state-maintaining in Southwest Asia, and how these relations are evolving through new channels of transnational renewable investment and decarbonization finance.

How have processes of domestic migration and urbanization re-shaped Jordan's repertoires of distributive politics, especially through the formal channels of parliament? How do Jordan's regime and tribal networks maintain spatially-oriented patronage networks in light of this migration? This project advances our understanding of these questions first by providing a finely-grained snapshot of the distribution and evolution of tribally-linked populations in Jordan by pairing novel voter file data across periods with several tribal genealogies, proposing various measurements of the density of tribal linkages. Second, the project reviews recent electoral reforms in Jordan, which have required constituents to register in their place of residence rather than providing them the option to register in their place of birth. Drawing on qualitative interviews and quantitative electoral returns, we examine the impetus behind these reforms, establish how tribally-linked candidates shift repertoires in response, and consider implications for the distribution of public goods across Jordan's urban/rural divides. In addition to generating novel measures of tribal linkages for scholars studying distributive politics, this project aims to carefully trace the strategic interactions that can sustain and maintain tribal and patronage networks amid urbanization.

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

How does land privatization affect inter-generational economic welfare? European colonial administrations often implemented land settlement programs that privileged the allocation of private property rights to the detriment of indigenous communal tenure systems. I examine how colonial reforms of property rights and land titling affected post-colonial economic opportunity in the case of Jordan, a British colony from 1921 to 1946. I argue that socioeconomic status of new title holders conditions the economic impact of land settlement on individuals in the long-term. In order to test this argument, I leverage variation in the pre-reform proportion of villages' communal tenure to examine individual-level economic well-being after the colonial-era reform. Using quantitative case study of one of the first public schools in Ajlun and the 2016 wave of the Jordan Labor Market Panel Survey (JLMPS), I match individuals' locality of birth to their historical village and examine the effect of a village's historical musha' tenure on individuals' wealth, asset ownership, internal migration, and educational attainment. I find that the effects of land privatization varied across time. In the short term, children from peasant families were increasingly able to attend school due to the capital infusion from land titling. In the decades that followed, however, I find that the inter-generational effects of land settlement were negative for the rural poor. In general, positive economic effects of land settlement accrued to those with higher socioeconomic status, i.e., the children of fathers who completed higher levels of education or who were not primarily employed in agriculture. This paper contributes to our understanding of how colonial legacies may perpetuate inequalities in post-colonial autocracies, and challenges the characterization of private property rights as a prerequisite for development and democratization.

How do demographic factors such as diversity influence the success or failure of administrative decentralization programs? This project investigates the impact that the establishment of Water User Associations (WUAs) had on the equity of irrigation water distribution in the Jordan Valley. Rather than arguing that the decentralization program itself succeeded or failed in its attempt to improve water management systems, I argue that this effect is moderated by the demographic characteristics of each area. Based on previous literature that has described a variety of opinions concerning how helpful these types of associations have been, I show that such decentralization programs are most successful in areas where the potential for corruption based on kinship ties is lowest. In areas where that potential is higher, we can expect to see unintended negative consequences on water management systems in that the institutions became vehicles through which existing elites could legitimatize their authority with little oversight. Throughout this project, I make the argument that we are most likely to see corruption when there is large variation in the relative ability of individuals to engage in corruption based on familial and tribal ties. In these cases, individuals are able to participate in corruption networks at the expense of their neighbors. In other cases, where the relative ability to engage in such transactions varies little from person to person, the total level of corruption falls, and we would expect a more equitable distribution of water. In the latter case, we would expect to see a positive effect of the introduction of local governance institutions. In the former, we can expect to see either no effect of these institutions or a negative effect wherein the establishment of WUAs facilitates corruption. I provide evidence for my argument through a combination of original interviews with farmers and personnel from the Jordan Valley Authority conducted from January 2024 through October 2024, quantitative analysis of differences in crop production within the Jordan Valley, and a novel dataset that uses voter registry data and tribal genealogies to develop estimates of tribal diversity at a local level. Tying together the political science and economics literature on decentralization, previous work on distributive politics and determinants of public goods provision, and anthropological accounts of Jordan’s tribal dynamics, this project contributes to our understanding of how existing social structures and hierarchies influence the effect of decentralization programs, challenging common one-size-fits-all approaches to development.