Paper short abstract:

Varying international players looked to desalination as a potential tool for development in the 1950s and 1960s, playing up its appeal to repurpose the oceans and help maximize the efficient use of the world’s water resources. Yet, as with so many high modernist stories, the panacea became the pain.

Paper long abstract:

Through a process encompassing global actors and international organizations, varying major players looked to desalination as a potential tool for development in the 1950s and 1960s. Similar to other large water infrastructure schemes in the post-WWII period, it became a novel iteration of well-established ideas about the power of technology to control nature and the “portability” of water expertise within the complex interplay of postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and the surge of Cold War tensions. While high costs still prohibited the use and application of desalination on a wide scale, proponents held hopes that new technological advances would soon bring about a massive breakthrough: tapping into the oceans to offer a new, easily accessible, and potentially endless source of fresh water for those places around the world that needed it the most. As with so many high modernist stories though, the panacea became the pain. In many ways, desalination largely proved a “failed” technology in that it did not offer a localized solution to a global problem and ended up requiring the same major investments in capital and energy as large dams, and portending similar environmental impacts. Yet, as a from of hope and aspiration, the pursuit of desalination illustrates the large number of possible paths of development found possible and desirable in the post-WWII period. Indeed, the high-modernist ethos took hold in different and multifarious forms, showing that the wider postwar push to meet water-related challenges from the supply side was complicated and contested to say the least.