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.