Contested flows: An ethnographic contribution to narratives of groundwater over abstraction in the central Jordanian highlands

This article explores the well-researched topic of Jordan's contentious hydropolitics in the face of scarcity from a new perspective: that afforded by an ethnographic case study of the poor and restive rural district of Dhiban in the highlands of central Jordan. Dhiban, well-known for its frequent protests, is experiencing some of the worst water scarcity in the country but remains relatively understudied in this context. The article traces how shifts between an emphasis on financialised demand management and supply-side megaprojects are experienced among small-scale highland farmers and their wider communities. In much of the extant literature, such communities are portrayed as complicit in wider water scarcity, as the failure of the state and its international backers to reduce groundwater over-abstraction driven by highland agriculture is blamed on the rural tribal patronage networks of highland landowners. A different picture emerges through attending to the fate of Dhiban and its farmers, and their attempts to resist and protest their position within Jordan's hydro-social metabolism. From their view, both supply and demand modes of mitigation have been experienced as forms of dispossession, with dire consequences for socio-ecological reproduction. I argue that this is because both rely on subjecting such places to the various hydraulic missions of the state and its international backers through infrastructure, rendering them zones of anticipatory ruination. This process can be conceived as the entanglement of local socio-ecological environments with global capitalogenic flows, that as they channel, transform, pollute, cheapen and consume water, also generate fragility.