AMMAN — While water scarcity in Jordan has been widely researched, mainly from an engineering perspective, less is known from the water politics angle, a Jordanian scholar said.
During a lecture titled “Water scarcity discourses and hydro-politics in the case of Jordan”, Hussam Hussein, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Kassel, Germany, explained that, as Jordan is known to be the second country in the world or, according to other research, among the four most water scarce countries in the world, there is a narrative behind those numbers.
“Who constructs this narrative in the region?
And what are the hidden interests behind this discourse?” he asked at the lecture held at the British Institute in Amman.
“Water politics can mean many different things.
It can include a movement, NGOs which shape water politics, but it can also involve state actors that sign international treaties and construct dams,” Hussein explained, adding “hydro-politics considers sharing of water resources on the surface by different state actors, [such as] rivers that cross more than one country and conflicts or cooperation between states in this regard.” “It was said by many prominent political figures that water wars will happen especially in the MENA region,” he continued.
According to Hussein, there are three pillars of hydro-hegemony and how water can be allocated: Geographic position; which means that if the country is upstream, it has an advantageous position, exploitation potential; which deals with the size of the country, infrastructure and its political power, and discoursing power which is the shaping of the way people think about water issues.
“Water scarcity can be physical and economic,” the expert continued, noting that the former means the physical lack of water while the later means insufficient industrial capacities to use available water in an efficient manner.
Regarding the Jordanian situation, Hussein said: “Water can bring people together and build bridges over water resources instead of creating new conflicts.” The scholar went on to identify the actors involved in constructing the discourse on water in Jordan and their interests, before examining the effects of the discourse on policy-options, analysing the solutions opened and closed by the discourse in the national water strategy.
Finally, he explored the effects of the deployment of the discourse on trans-boundary water governance, as well as other factors that shape Jordanian-Syrian, Jordanian-Israeli and Jordanian-Saudi hydro-political relations.