Presentation short abstract

Water exploitation in North-Africa, disproportionately affects marginalized communities. Agroecological and hybrid practices could offer sustainable, equitable alternatives. Decolonial, transdisciplinary approaches highlight pathways for just water ways.

Presentation long abstract

Discourses on water scarcity are increasingly prominent across North Africa. Declining rainfall and the overexploitation of groundwater mostly driven by industrialized agriculture disproportionately affect marginalized communities, yet dominant narratives often attribute scarcity to climate alone, obscuring these social inequities.

Recent social uprisings advocating environmental and social justice underscore the need to examine multiple coexisting food and water systems. Industrialized, export-oriented agriculture - shaped by imperial legacies - drives resource depletion and inequitable water access, while indigenous and agroecological practices persist as forms of resistance, prioritizing ecological stewardship, local autonomy, and sustainable management. Between these poles, hybrid practices sustain livelihoods, feed communities, and maintain ecological functions, yet remain constrained and threatened.

Water-related challenges and responses exist in a continuously transitional state. By foregrounding decolonial, transdisciplinary approaches, these practices reveal pathways for agroecological transitions that integrate water stewardship, equity, and community-centered governance, offering models of resilience and socially just futures.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores how Algeria’s drive for wheat self-sufficiency relies on groundwater-intensive desert agriculture, contrasting state-backed megaprojects with smallholder constraints, and showing how unequal resource access shapes the ambivalent political ecology of extractivism.

Presentation long abstract

This presentation's article examines Algeria’s capital-intensive expansion of Sahara agriculture, where fossil groundwater is extracted by local and foreign companies to achieve durum-wheat self-sufficiency, framed as strategic insurance for national sovereignty. It contrasts the struggles of smallholder farmers in northern Algeria, facing recurrent droughts and limited drilling authorizations, with the state’s facilitation of desert megaprojects such as the Italian agribusiness Bonifiche Ferraresi in Adrar.

It draws on four months of qualitative fieldwork (February 2024-June 2025) in Algiers, Bouira, Bordj Bou-Arréridj, Sétif, and Béjaïa, including over forty semi-structured interviews and on-site observations with farmers, agronomists, and state officials, combined with analysis of media, government, and corporate reports on wheat production in the desert.

It asks how to make sense of the contradiction between Algeria’s anti-imperialist discourse of food sovereignty and security, and its simultaneous promotion of state-facilitated groundwater extractivism for capital-intensive wheat production, one that privileges corporate actors over smallholders amid regional rivalry and US oversight.

Drawing on Linera’s view of extractivism as a technical system rather than a fixed mode of production (2013), and on debates between Hamouchene and Ajl, I hypothesize that Algeria’s food-sovereignty agenda reveals the political ambivalence of extractivism: unequal access to groundwater transforms a potentially emancipatory “sovereign extractivism” into one reinforcing elite accumulation.

By situating Algeria’s wheat production within imperialism and ecological governance, the presentation aims to reframe food sovereignty as a contested arena where corporate power persists, urging renewed attention to the political conditions under which extractivism might become socially and ecologically transformative.

Presentation short abstract

This study examines how development aid promotes avocado farming in Lebanon, advancing a standardized “copy-paste agriculture,” a heavily commercialized and extractivist agrarian model, while on paper promoting environmental and social equity, revealing contradictions in mainstream development.

Presentation long abstract

This talk examines how development interventions are reshaping Lebanese agriculture through the case of avocado cultivation. Lebanon’s agricultural sector operates under overlapping political and economic crises, marked by capitalist penetration, regional dynamics, and chronic neglect, conditions that make development aid a major transformative force.

Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation and dozens of interviews with farmers, NGO staff, consultants, and civil society actors, I explore how the promotion of avocado farming by development actors influences agrarian practices and the broader political ecology of Lebanese agriculture.

I argue that these interventions advance a standardized, industrialized mode of production I term “copy-paste agriculture.” This model spreads avocado cultivation widely but disregards environmental consequences and deepens inequities in resource allocation. By applying political ecology and post-development theory, the talk analyzes how power relations, market forces, and environmental concerns intersect in these transformations, revealing contradictions and failures embedded in mainstream development aid.

Rather than focusing narrowly on the avocado crop itself, I critique the development logic sustaining this model, one that prioritizes commercial viability over ecological and social sustainability. Avocado cultivation thus becomes a lens for understanding how historical trajectories, market imperatives, and power dynamics converge in Lebanon’s agricultural sector. This research highlights the overlooked role of agriculture in development debates and calls attention to the systemic issues underlying aid-driven interventions, challenging assumptions about their capacity to deliver equitable and sustainable outcomes.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation examines how development cooperatives in Jordan’s rural and Badia communities shape and reproduce power, mediating struggles over land, resources, and environmental justice. It highlights how cooperatives reflect broader political-ecological tensions and strategies of survival.

Presentation long abstract

The Southwest Asia North Africa (SWANA) region is often framed through environmental scarcity and underdevelopment narratives shaped by (post)colonial imaginaries of arid, underutilized landscapes. In Jordan, development interventions increasingly rely on cooperatives as a key mechanism for rural and Badia development, livelihood support, and resource management. Yet this focus on cooperatives often reinforces existing power hierarchies, channeling participation through selective, externally defined models while obscuring deeper political and historical drivers of marginalization. Drawing on the case of rural and Bedouin communities in Jordan, this presentation examines how cooperatives both mediate and reproduce tensions over land and resource access, environmental justice, and tribal-state relations. I argue that understanding the dynamics of cooperatives reveals not only local strategies of survival and adaptation but also the political ecology of development, where control over resources and knowledge is negotiated through uneven relations of power, governance, and resistance.

Presentation short abstract

This paper centres Jordan’s Azraq Wetlands, tracing how shifts in water use, geology, and livelihoods, specifically over-pumping of water and economic restructuring, have been shaped by colonial governance, post-colonial policies, and neoliberal development.

Presentation long abstract

The Azraq Wetlands are a large water ecosystem in the eastern desert of Jordan that have long provided an important site for migratory birds and wildlife, while also supporting several communities and sustaining a rich cultural heritage. In an area of Jordan’s desert where water is scarce, the wetlands are a unique space where rock, minerals, and water coalesce. The geological make-up of the area—including the black basalt formations—is central to Azraq. A salty aquifer beneath the wetlands was a source of livelihoods through salt production, and the presence of water sustained both human and animal life. However, changes in the late twentieth century dramatically altered the balance between rock, minerals, and water. Over-pumping of groundwater to supply urban centres in Jordan caused the natural springs that fed the Azraq Wetlands to shrink to 10% of their original size. Salt production also stopped as industrial-scale extraction from the Dead Sea became more profitable.

This paper explores these shifting relationships between rock, minerals, and water by situating them within processes of colonialism, capitalist accumulation, and ecological violence. It argues that many environmental challenges and transformations seen in Azraq stem from decisions made during the colonial period of the British Mandate, from Jordan’s (post)colonial nationalist policies, and from the expansion of neoliberal capitalist projects from the 1980s onward. Azraq provides an important case study for understanding the politics of environmental concerns, the material dynamics shaping control and access to resources, and—through centring community voices —offers insights into environmental justice and alternative epistemologies.

Presentation short abstract

This paper reports initial ethnographic findings on climate action under polycrisis in Lebanon, tracing how socioeconomic breakdown and hierarchical implementation impact environmental action.

Presentation long abstract

What does climate action look like in Lebanon, a country facing economic collapse, war, and environmental decline? As temperatures rise faster than the global average in the Eastern Mediterranean, Lebanese communities confront climate change under conditions of profound uncertainty. This paper reports initial findings from my new ethnographic research on how climate action is imagined and practiced amid overlapping capitalogenic crises.

The in-progress fieldwork examines two initiatives: a grassroots environmental collective and an NGO-led climate adaptation project. Through data from participant observation, this presentation outlines how climate action is shaped by everyday struggles, weak climate governance, and global policy frameworks. The research introduces the concept of climate/collapse to think of how climate change is experienced not as an isolated phenomenon but as entangled with socioeconomic breakdown, political stagnation, and colonial war: a polycrisis that reconfigures environmental engagement.

This paper asks: to what degree do local actors frame their climate action through pragmatic and relational strategies rather than abstract global narratives? How do climate actors negotiate between urgent material needs and long-term ecological visions? How are environmental responses embedded in social and political realities, and to what degree can tracing them challenge universalist assumptions about climate governance?

Rather than treating climate change as a universal challenge, this paper highlights how Lebanese actors reimagine environmental futures through climate action amidst intertwined social and ecological breakdowns.

Presentation short abstract

I will examine discursive production of water scarcity and underlying dimensions driving infrastructural developments through urban political ecology lens. My contribution will be to broaden political ecology literature by the specifics of the region and to politicise water insecurity in Istanbul.

Presentation long abstract

My presentation will examine the discursive production of water scarcity in relation to infrastructural development in Istanbul. I plan to examine the underlying dimensions, such as modernisation, nation-state building, and different developmentalist notions, driving infrastructural development and urban-centric visions that generate water (in)security. Additionally, I will explore the effects of infrastructural developments on the everyday experiences of water (in)security for differently positioned people_ specifically those living in the city and surroundings. Through this, I aim to understand who benefits from and who is disadvantaged by infrastructure development and water (in)security.

Istanbul and Turkey are important to explore because of various dynamics in the city and whole country. These include tensions between local and central governments, joining EU, notions of “development” and “modernisation” (Harris, 2008), neo-liberalisation (Erensu, 2015), and periods of centralisation and decentralisation of power (Kuyucu, 2017). While all these dimensions are affecting power dynamics in Turkey and Istanbul, literature on water (in)security and infrastructural development remains mainly apolitical, studied through environmental studies and scientific-technical views, with some exceptions of critical engagements (Harris, 2008, 2012; Harris & Alatout, 2010; Islar & Boda, 2014).

Therefore, my contribution will be twofold. Firstly, political ecology remains understudied in the MENA/SWANA region. I will explore the historical specificities and unique power dynamics that have shaped water insecurity and infrastructure development in Istanbul, broadening political ecology literature. Secondly, critical lens of political ecology will enhance and reshape understanding of the politics of environmental concerns and, more specifically, water insecurity and infrastructural development in Istanbul.

Presentation short abstract

This paper uses the rubric of primitive accumulation to discuss the transformation of Palestine in 1948-49, describing the paths of the parts of the country which came under Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian rule and analysing the Nakba as a particularly stark and violent instance of a global process.

Presentation long abstract

Between 1931 and 1961 the population of Palestine was two-thirds rural; by 1961 it was two-thirds urban. The uprooting of the local peasantry was primarily an outcome of the Nakba of 1948-49. This paper takes up the Marxian rubric of "primitive accumulation" to analyse the eco-political transformation of the country in this period, which diverged from the Eurocentric stereotype of the transition to capitalism insofar as the majority of this peasantry was not absorbed into the industrial workforce but "encamped" as a surplus population. The paper discusses the differential agrarian trajectories of the parts of the country which came under Israeli, Jordanian and Egyptian rule after the Nakba. In what became Israel, lands ethnically cleansed of their indigenous owners were turned over to capitalist agriculture organised in cooperatives and collectives (kibbutzim and moshavim respectively), while the remaining Palestinians were proletarianised. In the West Bank, the local peasantry managed to hold on to most of its land, though incoming refugees remained landless. In the Gaza Strip, finally, hundreds of thousands of refugees were crowded onto a small parcel of land incapable of supporting them agriculturally. Rather than seeing the case of Palestine as exceptional or unique, I argue that it is a particularly stark and violent case of the long-term global process of primitive accumulation. The capitalist-colonial transformation of agriculture, in Palestine/Israel and elsewhere, finds its mirror image in the entombment of the dispossessed in open-air prisons like Gaza, and their subjection to genocide if they resist.

Presentation short abstract

How do participants in Iran’s water protests represent their grievances? Analysing slogans, chants, and signs, this project shows how they reappropriate state-sanctioned narratives, resisting environmentally destructive projects while largely remaining within prescribed discursive boundaries.

Presentation long abstract

In Iran, environmental protests, especially those centred on water, have increased significantly in recent years. While these crises are ultimately rooted in global warming, they are exacerbated by exploitative economic practices that benefit the country's ruling class, leaving the general population — particularly marginalised communities, often ethnic minorities — to bear the greatest burdens. Even as these ecological distribution conflicts prompt mobilisation, elites maintain dominance through repression and by promoting mainstream understandings of environmental issues that deflect responsibility and exclude anti-government narratives. To explore how subaltern actors navigate this dynamic, this paper asks: How do participants in Iran’s water protests represent ecological and social grievances?

While several publications have addressed environmental movements in Iran, most focus either on urban, middle-class activism, thereby neglecting struggles in peripheral areas, or consider mobilisation in these areas solely through the lens of NGO activities. This project complements this body of literature by analysing protest materials, such as slogans, signs and chants, from major water-related protests in Iran between 2016 and 2025. Using Critical Discourse Analysis, I contextualise these expressions within the material realities of ecological distribution conflicts and examine how they interact with narratives promoted by elites. Ultimately, I argue that the framing promoted during these protests exploit contradictions in elite environmental discourse to resist exploitative practices; at the same time, however, these framings largely remain within sanctioned boundaries and reproduce mainstream narratives, falling short of articulating alternative visions of ecological inequality.

Presentation short abstract

Engaging with a post-Marxist political approach ecology we discuss how renewable energy projects in North Africa reshape territories and spark contestation. Looking at cases from Western Sahara to Egypt, we show how wind and solar energy expansion reproduce extractivist logics of dispossession.

Presentation long abstract

Addressing the questions of this panel, this presentation critically examines the expanding extractivist frontiers in North Africa, driven by narratives of green transitions sustainable development. It explores the complex dynamics between renewable energy projects and local contestations led by environmental defenders and self-determination movements. The rapid growth of wind and solar infrastructure, framed as part of green energy transitions, raises urgent questions about land rights, environmental justice, and the resurgence of neo-colonial power relations.

Drawing on examples from Western Sahara to Egypt, including Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, the presentation highlights how local communities contest renewable energy expansion and the territorial reconfigurations it brings. Research shows many projects proceed without indigenous consent, undermining rights to sovereignty and resource control. This exclusion perpetuates colonial legacies and denies basic human rights. In some cases, climate rhetoric is used to justify illegal occupations, enabling “greenwashing” of territorial control and masking exploitation with the complicity of States in the region.

The presentation addresses two broad questions: (a) How do renewable energy projects reshape socio-ecological landscapes and territories in North Africa? (b) What are the diverse local responses and contestations? Specifically, how does wind and solar energy expansion transform land-use practices, governance, and self-determination within green extractivism? Using a post-Marxist political ecology and a decolonial lens, the discussion will aim to challenge dominant narratives and contribute to alternative imaginaries of sustainable development in the region.

Presentation short abstract

This paper draws on a political ecology perspective and fieldwork on employment protests in Southern Iraq's oil fields to examine why capitalism and the unfettered extraction of oil are accepted as a self-evident good by people with lived experience of the toxicity of extractive industries.

Presentation long abstract

The political economies of Middle Eastern states are typically approached through theories of neo-patrimonialism. In these arguments, the importance of oil to countries in the region is often explained through the argument that the distribution of the rents it generates is crucial to maintaining the stability of state-society relations. However, my fieldwork on grassroots mobilisation for employment in Southern Iraq’s oil fields makes apparent that it is not necessarily the redistribution of oil rents that propels capitalism in the region, but the fantasy of such gains in the form of low paid and highly precarious work. To this end, I build on Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to develop the term “crude attachments” to describe how despite the fact that most people in Southern Iraq do not gain materially from the presence of the oil industry in their communities, and are in fact harmed by its pollution, they continue to see the carbon economy as the only feasible route to the “normative life” which capitalism offers as the path to the “good life”. Moreover, drawing on work in political ecology, I show that rather than shattering these crude attachments, toxicity shapes socio-ecological relations and my interlocutors’ desires in ways that are useful for capital. This works to keep an unequal and hierarchical capitalist system in place and stops them from pursuing broader structural change.

Presentation short abstract

This paper argues that urban agriculture (UA) in Palestine is more than food production; it is a space of solidarity and resistance under colonial control. Through an urban political ecology lens, UA emerges as survival, self-reliance, and grassroots food sovereignty.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how urban agriculture (UA) in Palestinian cities functions as a space of social solidarity and a mechanism for achieving food sovereignty, using the lens of urban political ecology. In a context marked by Israeli settler colonialism, spatial fragmentation, and militarized urban planning, UA emerges not as a technical solution to food insecurity but as a socially and politically embedded form of everyday resistance. The paper highlights how the closure of Palestinian cities during wars and popular uprisings, such as military checkpoints, curfews, and blockades, severs food supply chains between rural and urban areas, threatening urban food security and leading to sharp increases in food and vegetable prices, particularly in vulnerable neighborhoods and refugee camps. In such contexts, UA becomes a local strategy to build self-reliance and reduce dependence on politically controlled markets.

The paper draws on the experience of the Second Intifada (2000–2005) as a pivotal moment, during which urban agriculture supported networks of popular solidarity. Families, neighbors, and entire communities engaged in collective food production as a strategy of survival under siege. These practices were not merely economic responses but forms of social infrastructure that sustained life amid political violence and urban closure. Despite its importance, urban agriculture in Palestine remains institutionally marginalized and widely perceived as an informal sector. This reflects a broader governance failure and a top-down planning model that excludes grassroots solutions. The paper thus advocates for bottom-up, community-driven planning approaches that recognize and integrate UA into urban policy and resilience frameworks.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines the rise of food sovereignty movements amidst overlapping crises in Lebanon. By reviving traditional knowledges, and experimenting with solidarity-based economies, these initiatives open possibilities for reimagining food systems beyond neoliberal or sectarian logics.

Presentation long abstract

Lebanon’s agricultural lands are caught in overlapping crises: economic collapse, climate change, war, and the breakdown of state institutions. Historically sidelined by public policies in favor of more lucrative sectors, agriculture has long been deprived of structural support. In recent years, successive crises have deepened this structural collapse and exposed the fragility of the conventional food system, dependent on export-oriented monocultures, massive imports, agrochemical inputs, and intermediary monopolies, further exacerbating the precarity of small producers.

Yet within this fragmented landscape, agroecological initiatives are emerging as counter-hegemonic practices and infrastructures of survival. These grassroots mobilizations, spanning different stages of the food system, articulate visions of food sovereignty that resist both state failure and dependency on globalized markets. This paper offers a critical mapping of initiatives contributing to the development of a solidarity economy in Lebanon in times of crisis. From ecological farming cooperatives to seed-saving networks, from solidarity stores to producer markets, together, they form a fragile yet vibrant ecology of resistance, repair, and regeneration within Lebanon’s agrarian landscape.

The research places these struggles within Lebanon’s political ecology, attentive to the ways in which regimes materialize through soil, water, and infrastructure. It interrogates how local initiatives, in the absence of state reform, enact autonomy and resistance while navigating geopolitical pressures, including Israeli colonial violence and regional dependencies. Ultimately, this paper asks: how can agrarian struggles in Lebanon inspire a radical rethinking of markets, production chains, and governance ? How can food sovereignty be mobilized as a political project of emancipation ?

Presentation short abstract

Focusing on Jordan's ambitious state-led decarbonization efforts, this paper advances a two-way view of decarbonizing states as both mediators of global financialization pathways and as mediated by new topographies of distributed power that materialize through energy transition.

Presentation long abstract

As the specter of climate change threatens ecosystems and livelihoods around the world, private investment in renewable power generation has surged as a leading strategy for global climate change mitigation. In West Asia, decarbonization finance grafts onto existing sociospatial structures rooted in hydrocarbon economies, generating both subtle and profound shifts in resource flows and relations between states and subjects. Drawing from ethnographic engagement in Jordan tracing the design, construction, and reconfiguration of ambitious state-led decarbonization efforts, this paper advances a two-way view of decarbonizing states as both mediators of global financialization pathways and as mediated by new topographies of distributed power that materialize through energy transition. I trace these dynamic mediations through the state architectures of energy transition to highlight key tensions between the evolving expectations of a changing population and the shifting demands of project bankability. Advancing a relational view of decarbonization finance, this work contributes to critical scholarship on the places and practices that ground processes of assetization. By focusing in on the liminality of decarbonization as a continuous process of becoming, I highlight unfolding contradictions in the making and unmaking of state authority amidst rapidly shifting imperial and geopolitical constellations of power.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, contributes to extractivism studies in North Africa by examining how discreet re-appropriations of phosphate infrastructures in Gafsa, Tunisia, show these as sites through which claims to land, resources, and belonging are articulated.

Presentation long abstract

Despite the centrality of extraction to North Africa’s political economies, the region remains strikingly underrepresented, if not altogether absent, from the anthropology of resource extraction. This gap narrows our understanding of the frictions (Tsing 2005) that arise as colonial-era extractive projects persist and are reworked through new actors, technologies, and trajectories of capital. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Gafsa's mining basin, in Tunisia, this presentation examines these frictions as they surface in discreet re-appropriations of phosphate extractive infrastructures. Gafsa’s landscape is marked by the enduring imprint of a colonial economy whose infrastructures (company towns, rail lines, water drills) continue to funnel raw phosphate from the interior toward the coast and its ports. While protests and strikes dominate Gafsa’s national image, I foreground the more discreet practices through which residents value, redirect, or subvert these infrastructures: the voluntary repainting of Redeyef’s train station during rail rehabilitation in 2024; the fencing of agricultural plots with discarded water-extraction pipes; farmers’ tolerated tapping of company water tanks; and the assertion that phosphate is of the people as it is extracted from their ancestral lands. By attending to these practices, I explore how extractive and colonial infrastructures are sites in which (neo)colonial histories are emerging, and through which claims claims to land, resources, and belonging are articulated.