Squeezed dry: The historical trajectory of the lower Jordan river basin

The lower Jordan River basin (LJRB) provides a fascinating tale of coupled social and environ¬mental transformations of a waterscape. In this semi-arid to desert area, water is an essential determinant of life, cultural values, social struc¬tures, economic activities, power and politics. The trajectory of this basin (see Chapter 1, this volume), from a nomadic agro-pastoral Bedouin culture to an urbanized region where water circulation is highly artificial, illustrates how a particular resource endowment is valued, mobi¬lized, shared, used and fought for. This chapter first recounts past water resource development in the LJRB – defined as the Jordanian part of the Jordan River basin, downstream of Lake Tiberius – and dwells on the specific relationships between water, local culture and national/regional poli¬tics. The historical evolution of supply and demand is then expressed in terms of water balances that quantify the degree of closure of the basin.1 Water challenges and response options are then addressed through the lens of the distribution of the benefits and costs they entail, and of their linkages with the current distribution of decision-making and political power. Basin closure induces increased inter¬connectedness between water users and ecosystems through an increasingly manipu¬lated water cycle: response options are inter¬dependent and reveal the political and contested nature of resource sharing and water management (Molle et al., 2007). This chap¬ter describes how these processes, constrained by the drastic natural conditions of the basin, unfolded in the past 50 years and explores possible futures.