Presentation short abstract

This presentation explores the ways the emerging assemblages of desalination expertise are increasingly reconstructing visions of just access to water in Egypt. In doing so, it aims to bring into focus the water futures these assemblages open up and the ethical assumptions underlying them.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, non-conventional water resources, including desalination, have emerged as a critical aspect of Egypt's response to growing water scarcity, driven by climate change and population growth. As the country embarks on an ambitious program to ensure water security through significantly increasing its desalination capacity, new ethical and political questions arise, particularly in relation to universal and equitable access to water. A meaningful engagement with these questions necessitates that desalination is understood not merely as a technical challenge, but as the product of the confluence of a set of mutually entangled fields. These fields include water governance and policy, energy systems (especially high energy use and costs and the future integration of renewable energy), the involvement of international finance and the private sector through public-private partnerships (PPPs), environmental management (particularly the environmental impacts of the discharge of brine), and social equity and justice.

This paper draws upon the insights of the nascent field of the political ecology of desalination that stresses the socially constructed and politically contested nature of desalination (O’Neil and Williams 2024), to examine the ways these interlinked fields are shaping the contours of Egypt’s water strategy and future. In particular, it interrogates some of the new assemblages of expertise emerging out of them, asking how they morally and politically shape visions of just and equitable access to water in Egypt. Ultimately, the paper aims to bring into focus the kind of water future these assemblages open and make inevitable and the fundamental ethical assumptions underlying them.