Contested Waters, Contested Futures: The Environmental Imaginary and Development Planning in the Jordan Valley

While scholars have exhaustively examined the interstate hydropolitics of the Jordan River Basin, both scholarship and government documents largely delineate the Jordan River as an object of politics, whereas they mark the surrounding Jordan Valley as a separate object of development. This bifurcation limits understandings of both the water history of the Jordan River Basin and of the development of domestic Jordanian discourses of water scarcity. Between 1967 and 1972, Jordanian planners, with technical assistance and guidance from American, UNDP, and other Western development agencies, created a development plan that catered to different imagined Jordan political futures within different sections of the East Bank of the Jordan Valley. Through analyses of USAID, Department of State, World Bank, and Jordanian newspaper archives, I trace the underlying environmental and economic imaginaries of the existing infrastructure and planned development of the Jordan Valley between 1967 and 1972. I then demonstrate the durability of depictions of the Jordan Valley in present-day climate change and development planning documents through document analysis of Jordanian and UN gray literature. I argue that depictions of the Valley as a space for economic productivity, an orderly, empty space, or a space rich with natural ecological resources translate into development plans that political goals related to each imaginary in anti-political sentiments. Integrating scholarship from environmental history, political ecology, and Middle Eastern studies to examine the role of the environmental imaginary creates a better understanding of the history of the Jordan Valley outside of politics and physical infrastructure.