Irrigate to accumulate: moral ecologies of water and land speculation in Jordan’s eastern desert fringe

This article traces the dilemmas and tensions involved in irrigating as a means of staking claims to arid land in the context of Jordan’s urban expansion and the anticipation of increasing land prices. Speculation through enclosure and irrigation has coincided in recent years with an ever-louder discourse of water scarcity, and a moral concern over the use of groundwater via illegal wells, eroding the viability of small-scale agriculture. Tracing a specific case of a speculative gambit and placing it in relation to a nearby agricultural community experiencing the disastrous effects of water scarcity, I explore how rural and peri-urban Bedouin anxiously anticipate various uneasily coexisting futures around land and water, between poles of personal enrichment and wider social and environmental ruination.