Divine trust (Amana) and climate change in Jordan: valuing water in the face of water scarcity

In the current context of environmental collapse and climate change, warnings about the threat of global severe water shortages have proliferated in media and policy discourses. At the same time, in many parts of the world, ordinary people, state institutions, and global financial actors are engaged in daily struggles over forms of water valuation. At stake in these struggles is the question: is water a commodity or a right? Based on ethnographic research conducted among Muslims and Christians in Jordan, this paper will explore how debates about forms of valuing water could be extended beyond the right/commodity and private property/commons distinctions to include religiously-informed forms of valuation. To do so, this paper shows how Muslims and Christians in Jordan provoke a mode of water valuation that is grounded in the idea of the ethical imperative to fulfil the amana (divine trust). Central to amana is the constant ethical labor of balancing the human right to govern/enjoy public resources such as water with divine responsibility. Amana affirms the value of water as a common good accessible to all and shared across generations while simultaneously making the realization of this value dependent on the divinely mediated relations of trust and obligation that hold together all of God’s creation. As such, the stakes in this mode of valuing water go beyond the struggle to counter the financialization of public water to insist on the necessity of making space for a non-possessive relationship to water that is embedded in shared createdness and oriented towards the hereafter and accountability to God.