Participating in agribusiness. Contested meaning of rurality and water in Jordan

In recent years, literature and policy-making on water management has increasingly attracted, in Jordan as elsewhere, the attention of local and foreign stakeholders, in the form of relief or development agencies. Agrarian policies and transformations have inevitably focused on water modernization and irrigation policies, with a sudden introduction of participative techniques and discourses in water management. Reflecting a tendency initiated among international organizations in the early 1990s, notions borrowed and popularized from social sciences, and more particularly from sociology and cultural anthropology, have erupted in rural management in Jordan and the rest of the Middle East. Such concepts as ‘participation’ or ‘empowerment’ of the poor, ‘coping strategies,’ ‘safety net,’ and ‘solidarity network,’ that were previously unknown or censured in policy-making circles, have since then pervaded development literature in a renewed attempt to redefine the meanings and roles of irrigated agriculture, and of farmers, in a rural and national context characterized by increasing water scarcity. This tendency reflects the attempt to delegate to farmers’ associations part of the costly and ineffective water distribution in the Jordan Valley. Indeed, this new policy shift reveals new meanings and changes of rurality that are at staked in contemporary Jordan, at least at the rhetorical and discursive level