Power failures, sovereignty and environmental justice in Lebanon

In his post, Owain Lawson explains

As I work towards finishing my first book—Power Failures: Development, Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in Lebanon—I have become preoccupied with the question of whether we can draw lessons from earlier eras of massive transformation in the built and natural environment for the climate challenges we face today. For me, some of the answers to this question can be found through a transnational history of Lebanon’s largest river, the Litani.

I first became interested in the Litani while researching in Lebanese archives for my MA thesis, which explored the impacts of French environmentalism and reforestation in interwar Lebanon and Syria. Reading the work of Lebanese economists and engineers in the 1930s, it became clear that they believed water was Lebanon’s most valuable and precious resource. Lebanon’s coastal Mediterranean mountain climate vividly contrasts the arid expanses found inland in Syria and Iraq. And unlike those countries, where speculators were finding vast quantities of oil, Lebanon had no important belowground resources. So there were significant practical questions about how Lebanon could power industrialization. Many saw hydroelectricity as an ideal solution, as well as a feat of harnessing nature that would telegraph Lebanon’s arrival into modernity. However, emphasizing Lebanon’s water resources in this way also contributed the construction of Lebanese national exceptionalism, buttressing arguments that Lebanon was environmentally, economically, and politically distinct from its neighbors. Uncovering sources about that relationship among nature, development, and nationalism made me realize that I had found a story worth writing an entire book about.

The Litani River provided an extraordinary lens to thoroughly reconsider the modern history of Lebanon and the Eastern Mediterranean. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Litani transformed from a minor watershed in Ottoman Syria into a contested borderland. Rival empires and national movements attempted to claim it through force of arms, diplomacy, and economic monopolization. Through the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the region ultimately came under French control as part of the new state of Lebanon. This contradicted the expressed demands of most (but not all) communities in the Litani basin. During the years of French rule (1920–1943), Lebanese engineers argued that if they harnessed the Litani to generate electricity and expand agriculture, the river would be the key to postcolonial Lebanon’s economic self-determination. Following Lebanon’s independence, the Litani Project (1954–65) became the country’s only major development scheme until the 1990s. Lebanese planners initially conceived the Litani project as constructing grand-scale hydroelectricity and irrigation infrastructure that would link the Litani basin, in Lebanon’s hinterland, to Beirut, the rapidly growing capital, benefiting both equitably.

The Litani project’s origins provide a remarkable window into the emergence of the postwar and postcolonial international order in the Middle East. Its plans were initially prepared in partnership between the Lebanese Ministry of Public Works and the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR). Their partnership reflected how the US was replacing Britain and France as the hegemonic international power in the region and its special interest in Lebanon as an anticommunist ally. The project was ultimately designed in partnership between the Lebanese Litani River Authority (LRA) and a French engineering consortium, a result of France’s strenuous efforts to maintain its primacy in Lebanon’s political economy after its independence. In 1955, the Lebanese government took on an outsized loan from the World Bank to construct the project. Since it began development lending in 1949, the Bank had made investing in Lebanon a priority. The bankers hoped that investing in the Litani project as a showpiece in relatively stable and affluent Lebanon might help convince the emerging revolutionary Arab republics to accept the restrictive conditions of international loans.

These national and international institutions and their priorities consistently overrode the interests of farming communities in the Litani River basin itself. Village leaders and rural mayors developed their own strategies to demand urgently needed investment in potable water and electrification that could help keep agrarian society tenable. The World Bank redesigned the project around its own narrow financial imperatives: infrastructure that extracted resources from the Litani basin to generate electricity exclusively for Beirut, the capital.

In the 1960s, the project became politicitized in new and incendiary ways. Construction was extremely behind schedule and over budget. The dams and tunnels radically transformed the basin’s biodiversity. And instead of the water and electricity rural communities urgently needed, the infrastructure effectively cut them off from using the Litani at all. These transformations in the project’s purpose and benefits reflected the Lebanese state’s broader preference for urban-centric development, which the World Bank shared. As a result of that broader pattern of rural disinvestment, Lebanon’s rural economy collapsed in the early 1960s, concurrent with the project’s conclusion.

Immiserated agrarian communities migrated to the diaspora or Beirut’s burgeoning shantytowns. These migrants were largely Shi‘a Muslims, and began increasingly to mobilize politically on a Shi‘a sectarian basis to demand the redistribution of and popular sovereignty over water resources. Those mobilizations were central to building the popular base of the two Shi‘a organizations that now dominate Lebanese politics: Harakat Amal and Hizballah. This Islamist trend would never self-identify as “environmentalist,” in the conventional Euro-American sense, but was organized around questions of equitable resource distribution, provision of clean water, and communal sovereignty over a landscape that had strong emotional resonance; in short, over questions of environmental justice. This uncomfortable history informs two of the final arguments I am exploring in Power Failures. First, that sectarian mobilization should be understood as an outcome of the global and local maldistribution of natural resources and harms, and second, that environmental politics must not be mistaken for a transhistorical and transregional politics of the left.

Over the past decade, the Litani River basin has become globally infamous for its pollution levels, a central part of a persistent public health crisis across Lebanon’s most impoverished agrarian regions. The Litani is also, tragically, only one element of the intersecting environmental, economic, and political disasters that have consumed Lebanese public life since the present financial meltdown began in 2018. I hope my book helps to ground discussions of possible solutions to these present crises in a more thorough and rigorous historical context.

If you want to know more about the research of Dr Lawson into environment, development and the Middle East, visit his pages here.

Dr Owain Lawson is Lecturer in Environmental History at Cardiff