Organised abandonment in Lebanon's Litani River Basin

Abstract

This paper is a historical political ecology of the organised abandonment of Lebanon's rural margins. It argues that the present ecological catastrophe in the Litani River basin derives from the historical constitution of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus as mediators of flows of capital that generate ecological fragility, or “capitalogenic flows.” In 2021, a massive fish kill brought the Litani River basin's spectacular ecological degradation to global attention. In response, the Litani River Authority (LRA), the Lebanese agency that manages the basin, launched a campaign against “environmental crimes” that concentrated on displacing thousands of Syrian refugees and demolishing their homes. This reflects a rebranding of the LRA, which was founded in 1955 to coordinate a World Bank loan for hydroelectric infrastructure on the Litani. Rather than commodify the water itself for irrigation or drinking—which might entail pollution controls—the Bank monopolised the basin landscape as an energy resource. Prevented from accessing the river, Litani communities have repeatedly reasserted popular sovereignty. The paper situates that history in the context of the institutional formation of Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus. Unlike postcolonial countries subjected to neoliberal dispossession after 1980, decades of contested institution-building from Lebanon's origins arrayed the state and its regulatory capacities around capitalogenic flows and the organised abandonment of the country's rural surplus population.