Organised abandonment in Lebanon's Litani River Basin

In the summer of 2020, shoppers in markets in some of Lebanon's most impoverished areas unwittingly bought hundreds of kilograms of toxic fish from Lake Qara‘un (Khalil, 2020). The Litani River, Lebanon's largest river, drains the Biqa‘ valley's snow and rain and feeds into the lake. As it runs south from Baalbeck, the Litani also accumulates the valley's waste and deposits it in Lake Qara‘un. For the preceding decade, scientists and activists warned of the extraordinary volume of agricultural, industrial, and household waste accumulating in the lake and saturating soil, crops, and people throughout the Biqa‘. In the lake, the pollutants and algal blooms have turned the water a sickly bottle green. From Lake Qara‘un, fish made their way to markets in the Biqa‘ valley, Sabra, and Qarantina, each home to successive generations of Armenian, Palestinian, Kurdish, and Syrian refugees. Then, in April 2021, a massive fish kill in Lake Qara‘un made international headlines (AFP, 2021). More disturbing still, inspectors continued to discover Qara‘un fish in markets not only in Lebanon, but even in Syria—rotten carp, packed in ice and smuggled over the border to markets in Damascus (Middle East Monitor, 2021).

The Litani River Authority (LRA), the Lebanese para-state agency that manages the river and lake, broke the news of the toxic fish at market (LRA, 2020a). They alleged that an illicit network of soldiers, fishermen, and unscrupulous vendors were responsible for fishing, distributing, and selling the illegal and noxious fish. In 2018, the Lebanese government granted the LRA new powers to police and protect the lake. Since then, the LRA has pursued three strategies. First, they have hundreds of violation notices to factories, municipalities, and farms in the Litani River basin. Second, they have enforced a ban on fishing in Lake Qara‘un imposed by Lebanon's Ministry of Agriculture (Amacha and Baydoun, 2018; Khatib et al., 2019; LRA, 2020b) and assisted police in arresting Biqa‘ residents caught fishing or launching boats into the lake (El Amine, 2019). Some in Lebanon's legal and civil society community approved of these measures as establishing an important precedent to hold polluters accountable throughout Lebanon and to protect fragile environments (Saghieh, 2019). But it is not clear how uniformly or effectively these penalties are actually being enforced, or how many polluters have paid their fines. What the LRA has clearly and vividly prosecuted successfully is its third strategy: the destruction of Syrian refugee camps and displacement of Syrian refugees (UNHCR, 2019).

Since 2013, hundreds of thousands of Syrians fleeing persecution and war have lived in informal camps in the Litani River basin, which runs parallel to the nearby Lebanon-Syria border. Without access to licit sources of potable water, drainage, or sanitation, encamped Syrians have relied heavily on the polluted Litani River for all three. In a months-long campaign in 2019, the LRA demolished hundreds of Syrian informal homes and forcibly relocated thousands of refugees (Allaw, 2019). The LRA's prolific Twitter account filled with videos of bulldozers crushing tents, accompanied by triumphal, martial music. They have repeated these efforts in the years since. The LRA has declaimed the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other international relief and aid institutions for failing to adequately provide for the refugees’ sanitation. They have portrayed destroying insanitary camps as an important step towards improving refugees’ conditions. Their campaign contributes to a broader trend in which various political actors have targeted Syrian refugees to explain economic, infrastructural, and humanitarian crises in Lebanon that long preceded 2013, the pollution of the Litani among them. Politicians routinely demonize Syrian refugees. Municipalities have instituted special regulations to restrict refugees’ movement on the pretext that they pose a threat to public health and to the natural environment (Human Rights Watch, 2018). Since 2019, Lebanese governing institutions have made efforts to forcibly return refugees to Syria, where some face recriminatory violence from the Asad regime (Amnesty International, 2023).

After gaining their new powers in 2018, the LRA's chairman and its social media team began inveighing against rampant “environmental crimes” in the Biqa‘ valley. ¹ Implicit in their campaigns against refugees, municipalities, and the farms and businesses that sustain them is that these groups—who comprise a significant proportion of the Litani basin's public—are environmental criminals responsible for devastating the basin. The LRA's turn to coercion, in that framing, is a means of policing these criminals and protecting the basin from them. This article provides an alternative genealogy of the Litani basin's ecological catastrophe. It argues that the catastrophe derives from the historical constitution of key Lebanese state institutions as mediators of flows of capital that generate ecological fragility, or “capitalogenic flows.”

My use of the term “capitalogenic flows” draws upon Moore's (2017, 2018) insistence that contemporary ecological catastrophes should be understood as capitalogenic—products of the historical operations of capital in a particular context—rather than anthropogenic—deriving from a macrohistorical trend towards exhausting natural resources. As Tsing (2015) argues, capital accumulation is constitutively dependent on the capture of nonhuman pericapitalist activities. These activities are the messy ecological processes—soil metabolism, sedimentation, decomposition, and so on—that produce value outside of human control. However, as Fraser (2022: 24) asserts, capital “persistently devours the very supports on which it relies” and “cannibalizes its own conditions of possibility” by extracting from and instrumentalizing these activities beyond the point of exhaustion. This process simultaneously enables states and corportations to employ spaces, ecologies, and communities as sinks for surpluses and waste (see also Smith, [1984] 2008: 69–71). States have then managed exhausted landscapes as “sacrifice zones” (Bullard, 1994; but the term has deeper origins, see Juskus, 2023): abandoned zones on the margins of regulation. This management subjects inhabitants of capitalogenic sacrifice zones to the long-term harms Nixon (2011) terms “slow violence.”

The history of the Litani River, the LRA, and Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus illustrates these processes. The LRA was founded in 1955 as a parastatal borrowing institution to receive and manage Lebanon's first-ever loan from the World Bank, a loan for the Litani River development project. In that role, the LRA oversaw the construction of infrastructure on the Litani that manifested the economic and financial interests of the World Bank and the Lebanese state, rather than the interests of Litani basin communities. The infrastructure enabled these institutions to monopolise the river basin as an energy resource and put the watershed to work producing kilowatt-hours. That process of capturing and instrumentalizing of the Litani basin, as will be shown, was fundamental to producing the contemporary ecological catastrophe. Through the early twenty-first century, the LRA remained primarily an electricity utility whose revenues serviced loans from the World Bank and the investment banks of several Gulf states. The LRA only began branding themselves as a “green” institution and managing the Litani basin as an “environmental” issue per se in 2018, after the ecological catastrophe had set in and the state expanded their powers to police pollution. The basin's ecological catastrophe also provides a novel lens to understand the LRA's interconnections within an archipelago of regulatory institutions that have administered flows of capital and the organised abandonment of Lebanon's surplus population for decades. That abandonment is most evident today in the degradation of potable water quality and wastewater treatment across Lebanon, and in the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion, caused by a mismanaged stockpile of the agricultural fertiliser ammonium nitrate.

The use of the term “organised abandonment” here calls special attention to the relationship between the capitalogenic production of sacrifice zones and state practices of criminalization, policing, and coercion. This builds on the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who diagnoses how US structural adjustment programs coordinated the “organized abandonment of many productive, reproductive, and cultural capacities” (Gilmore, 2011: 33). “Organized abandonment,” Gilmore argues, constitutes “the other side of globalism's uneven development coin: structural adjustment, environmental degradation, privatization, genetic modification, land expropriation, forced sterilization, human organ theft, neocolonialism, involuntary and superexploited labor” (Gilmore, 2002: 92; see also Harvey, [1982] 2006: 397). An abolitionist geographer, Gilmore developed this tool to analyse the establishment of mass incarceration in the US, focused on California (ca. 1979–2000). She argues that in the 1970s, when structural adjustment dispossessed the public goods that had been established under the New Deal in the 1930s, California orchestrated mass incarceration as a geographic solution which, in turn, radically restructured the state and its capacities (Gilmore, 2002: 97). Gilmore identifies how restructuring the state around a coercive apparatus produces zones of violence that are unevenly distributed along class and racial lines, creating organic connections between social movements for prison abolition and for environmental justice (Gilmore and Gilmore, 2003).

Across the Middle East and much of the Global South, many countries became subject to neoliberal dispossession during this same period, which was also the era of the Washington Consensus and structural adjustment programs. Gilmore's arguments provide an important means of drawing connections between the experience of racialized workers in the United States and their peers in the Middle East who are also trapped in the long afterlife of structural adjustment. But the history of Lebanese state formation provides a usefully distinct case study in which to explore these dynamics. ² Lebanon's postcolonial state-builders established few welfare institutions, state-owned lands, expansive public infrastructure, or a military-industrial complex to privatize and dispossess. Moreover, Lebanon's state-builders employed many of the signature policies of structural adjustment as principles of governance during the beginnings of the country's formal independence. Through decades of contested institution-building, Lebanese political, banking, and business leaders produced the Lebanese state as an archipelago of overlapping institutions, arrayed around capitalogenic flows. These institutional relationships systematically hindered or prevented planning the productive industrial and agricultural sectors, producing and maintaining the organised abandonment of the country's rural surplus population. When rural projects such as the Litani project were pursued through these institutions, they have tended to produce uneven, patchwork infrastructure that maldistributed resources and harms. In this respect, the organised abandonment of rural Lebanon resembles less Gilmore's California and more the “choppy” quality of infrastructural failure in occupied Palestine, which Stamatopoulou-Robbins (2020: 35) describes as “a disjointed, or jerky, quality that is inconstant and unsettling as if at sea without a lifeboat.”

This article further argues the special utility of the methods of historical political ecology to understanding the present-day Litani and the Lebanese case more broadly. Dominant framings of the Litani basin's ecological catastrophe, such as those offered by the LRA, are only sustainable in the context of institutionalised historical amnesia. That institutionalisation derives in part from the diplomatic settlements in 1998–1991 that concluded the period of civil and proxy wars known collectively as the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). This included a general amnesty agreement that prevented historical accountability, which has extended broadly throughout state institutions and the public education sector (Haugbolle, 2010: 69–74). Contemporary causal explanations of the Litani basin's ecological catastrophe, like much analysis of contemporary Lebanon, commonly begin with the post-Civil War reconstruction and reform period (e.g., Abou Slaymane and Soliman, 2022; Darwish et al., 2023; Khatib et al., 2019; Majdalani, 2024). The academic history of Lebanon's postindependence period is a growing but small field (e.g., Abisaab, 2010; Bardawil, 2020; Gates, 1998; Maasri, 2020; Traboulsi, 2012). Important recent historical studies (Abu-Rish, 2014, 2021; Safieddine, 2019) have explored the contested processes through which Lebanon's postindependence state institutions became arrayed around the capture of flows of capital. Makdisi (2001, 2008, 2012), Riachi (2013, 2016), Eid-Sabbagh (2015, 2023), and Khneisser (2023) have made important studies of Lebanon's contemporary water sector. However, few studies have directly explored the capitalogenic ecological consequences of these post-independence institutional formations and none have explored the formation and role of the LRA. As Davis (2015: 263) argues, “it is only with a sophisticated and critical understanding of the historical development of landscapes/environments, of social relations, and of knowledge and the privilege that attends it, that we can reveal the hidden relations of power often at play in the questions studied by political ecologists.” The absence of these vital histories hampers researchers’ ability to effectively diagnose ecological problems, which in turn permits state institutions to legitimise coercive and ineffectual “solutions” that deliberately misconstrue the problem.

The article first identifies how Lebanon's postcolonial state-builders constructed institutions to attract, capture, and mediate circuits of regional and Euro-American financial and corporate capital. These institutions produced a pattern of organised abandonment of the rural margins. I then demonstrate how the LRA epitomized and exacerbated these patterns. Under the World Bank's direction, the LRA oversaw the disbursal of international funding and the construction of infrastructure that monopolised the Litani basin as an energy resource and prevented Litani basin communities from employing it in irrigation. I argue that this reorganization of the river is the basis for the present catastrophe. Finally, I explore the emergence of other fields of environmental regulation—environmental law, wastewater, and agricultural inputs—that have functioned as intermediary institutions for capitalogenic flows and contribute to the present catastrophe.

Capitalogenic flows and the construction of the Lebanese state

During the era of decolonization in the Middle East and North Africa (ca. 1950s–1970s), many newly independent states pursued development strategies though sought to build postcolonial sovereignty through self-sufficiency. These strategies included efforts to protect domestic production from neoimperial market penetration—such as import-substitution industrialization, price controls, nationalization of infrastructure and industries controlled by foreign corporations—as well as to distribute public goods such as clean water, education, and employment (Abu-Rish, 2021: 179). Many states pursued land redistribution policies tied to a socialist-inspired politics of redistribution, breaking up large estates and promoting small freeholding. Tied explicitly to populist legitimacy and anti-imperialism, these policies enjoyed great popular support in Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia, among other countries (Abul-Magd et al., 2021). However, the oil shocks of the 1970s and 1980s, the decline of the Soviet Union as a source of economic, military, and political support, and the fragmentation of Third-Worldist institutions brought this period of decolonial developmentalism to a close. In the 1980s, many of these states began campaigns to privatize public goods, slashing subsidies on basic goods and reducing opportunities for public-sector employment. This began decades of neoliberal dispossession, in which political, military, and business elites reconfigured postcolonial redistributive states around securing and monopolising streams of global finance capital (Abul-Magd et al., 2021). These new policies both derived from and facilitated penetration by international financial institutions, most notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which championed them as “structural adjustment.” These decades of dispossession and concomitant degradation of living standards and nonhuman life produced the fundamental grievances that have erupted in revolutions and insurrections across the countries since 2011 (Abul-Magd et al., 2021; Beinin, 2015; Sallam, 2022).

Lebanon's state formation and political economy followed a significantly different, but closely interrelated, pattern of development. Unlike postcolonial countries subjected to neoliberal dispossession after 1980, decades of contested institution-building during the construction of Lebanon's postcolonial state arrayed the state around the capture of circuits of capital, particularly finance capital. As Safieddine (2019) shows, the French empire constructed the state of Grand Liban (1920–1943), under League of Nations Mandate, as a collection of loosely connected institutions that mediated imperial power. The Mandate state's financial and economic regulatory institutions sought to solidify and expand the capitalogenic flows established by French and Lebanese joint-stock companies in the late nineteenth century at Beirut's central exchange, which distributed those flows throughout greater Syria (Alff, 2018). After Lebanon's independence (1943), market forces and financial interests encouraged the formation of Lebanon's state institutions as an archipelago, with minimal powers of central planning or coordination. In particular, the Banque du Liban, the French concessionary corporation that served as the bank of issue, remained a powerful conservative force that pressured the government to stabilize the currency at the expense of long-term investment in industrial or agricultural development (Safieddine, 2019: 40).

By 1955, Lebanon's postcolonial state-builders had institutionalised an open, laissez-faire, service-based economy (Gates, 1998: 1; Abu-Rish, 2021: 187). Industrial interests, urban consumer groups, and popular and elite political organisations contested state limitations on industry and public services (Abu-Rish, 2014). Despite constituting a minimal percentage of GDP, agriculture was by far Lebanon's largest employment sector. But, in addition to the interests of the state institutions being built in Beirut, three key factors in the countryside contributed to establishing a pattern of organized abandonment. First, large rural and agricultural interests maintained their estates through their dominance of a fractious and ineffectual parliament. Second, the largest agricultural firm, the Régie des Tabacs et Tombacs, enjoyed a Mandate-era concessionary monopoly on tobacco cultivation and processing that dominated much of South Lebanon. And third, despite strong efforts at political mobilization, farming communities had no effective democratic mechanisms to assert their interests in planning.

By the end of the 1950s, this pattern of organised abandonment led to an overproduction crisis of agricultural commodities—citrus, apples, potatoes, and sugar beets—that collapsed the rural agricultural sector and drove smallholders and tenant farmers out of the countryside (Gates, 1998: 110; Nasr, 1978: 6; Ziadé, 1955: 4). Rural migrants formed what Kalyan Sanyal terms a “ship of fools,” the “dispossessed and marginalized, [who] wander around in a wasteland created by capitalist development. . . . those who are expelled from the agricultural sector and at the same time excluded and segregated from the glittering modern, urban economy” (Sanyal, 2007: 47). Thousands joined the expansive Lebanese global diaspora, itself a product of the silk industry's overproduction crisis just a few decades earlier (Pitts, 2018: 106; Thompson, 2000: 30–34). Many thousands more settled in rapidly urbanising villages on Beirut's periphery, forming an infamous “misery belt” of informal neighbourhoods that would later become known as Beirut's southern suburbs (Fawaz, 2008). Informal houses and neighbourhoods often butted up directly against new middle-class neighbourhoods of elegant and well-provisioned midrise apartment blocks, creating an urban built environment of striking and unmistakable contrasts among classes (Take, 1972).

Remarkably, the business and banking elite who dominated Lebanese postcolonial state-building devised laissez-faire monetary and economic policies that substantially exceeded the recommendations of international financial institutions in this period. Researchers from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (World Bank) recognized Lebanon's dire urban-rural inequalities (IBRD, 1949: 7). They joined the IMF in recommending that Lebanon make substantial investments in industry, agriculture, and basic planning capacity. Unlike their better-known policy prescriptions during the Washington Consensus era of the 1980s-90s, in the 1950s, the Keynesian economic principles prevalent in the US and Europe informed these institutions (Safieddine, 2019: 44). Lebanon's state-builders rejected these recommendations to better protect the banking sector. Michel Chiha, the leading Lebanese state-builder, banker, and public intellectual memorably explained this rejection in terms of national exceptionalism: “The Occident is our teacher in the order of the exact sciences, mechanics, and statistics, and it will remain so indefinitely. It is not our teacher in the order of political philosophy, knowledge of human nature, and the economic and financial sciences. . . . In regard to the Occident's economic, budgetary, and social disciplines, we must not be servile imitators, but only attentive observers” (Chiha, 1951: 261–262; Lawson, 2021: 77–78).

After Lebanon's 1958 civil conflict, the reformist president Fu’ad Shihab's government inaugurated a of substantial expansion of state institutions and their powers that transformed their scope, reach, and efficiency. This campaign included liquidating the concessionary bank of issue and establishing the national Banque du Liban, expanding public education, and investing in basic rural infrastructure. By building roads, schools, and hospitals, and providing water and electricity to towns and villages in rural Lebanon, the Shihabists sought to diminish the explosive urban-rural and sectarian inequalities that had exacerbated the 1958 conflict (Traboulsi, 2012: 141–142). However, these efforts were incommensurate with the scale of rural economic collapse, and rural flight escalated throughout the 1960s (Nasr, 1978: 10). Neighboring countries experimenting with Arab socialist economic policies pursued planned economic development by using strict controls on foreign exchange to minimize predatory speculation. By contrast, Shihabist financial sector reforms enshrined the Banque du Liban as a vector for capital streams—in particular capital flight from the Gulf, Syria, and Palestine—that sustained an ecosystem of accumulation among Beirut's private banks (Safieddine, 2019: 110–114; Abu-Rish, 2021: 188). While the Lebanese government greatly increased spending on public works, their budget derived primarily from treasury disbursements. The Banque du Liban refused to lend to public institutions except in “exceptionally dangerous circumstances” (Safieddine, 2019: 112) and strongly discouraged private banks from doing so. These policies perpetuated the prioritisation of currency stability and limitations on development spending through the 1970s. Most importantly as concerns the Litani, this period of state expansion came after the World Bank had already cemented its influence in Lebanon. The Bank's first major loan to Lebanon, to support the construction of hydroelectric infrastructure on the Litani River, granted it significant leverage on Lebanese governmental decision-making, powers which it preserved throughout the 1960s.

The IBRD's capacity to leverage its loan to discipline Lebanese state institutions is another critical distinction between Lebanon and Gilmore's California. In both contexts, contentious relationships among state, corporate, and financial institutions shaped the process of organised abandonment. At stake in Lebanon were the powerful implications those relationships had for the politics of postcolonial national self-determination and the perpetuation of foreign domination. The Shihabists’ reforms were organised partly as efforts to secure state institutions’ economic sovereignty, meaning their capacity to set economic policy. They succeeded in dissolving many lingering European concessionary monopolies (Safieddine, 2019: 117–122). However, during these same decades, international institutions, most importantly the IMF and World Bank, gained new leverage over those institutions that perpetuated imperial patterns of control over policymaking. As the next section shows, in the postcolonial period, the LRA was an unwilling instrument in that process.

The history of Lebanon's postcolonial state-building and organised abandonment also shows a markedly different trajectory than its neighbouring Arab states. However, as Ziad Abu-Rish (2021) has argued, this should not lead us to believe that Lebanon is an exceptional case, or that, as Chiha claimed, Lebanon's cultural-national distinctiveness produced these important differences. Rather, the formation of Lebanon postcolonial state was integral to broader processes of market and state formation in the Middle East, in which Lebanon served as a critical intermediary for global and regional capital. As the next section shows, the history of the Litani project, the World Bank's first significant investment in the Middle East, and the Litani River Authority, which administered the Bank loan, bears out Abu-Rish's analysis.

Monopolising of the Litani Basin as an energy resource

Today, the Litani River Authority (LRA) is responsible for planning and maintaining hydroelectric and irrigation infrastructure on the Litani River, as well as monitoring the river and all watercourses in Lebanon. In 2018, the government issued a new water code that expanded the LRA's legal powers to police the pollution of ground and surface water sources (Mehanna and Ayyub, 2019). As depicted in the introduction, the LRA has employed these powers to prosecute a legal and public-relations campaign against “environmental crimes,” which has included ticketing, lawsuits, policing, and the demolition of refugee homes. These actions bolstered the LRA's efforts to rebrand itself as a kind of “green” environmental agency over the past decade. However, the historical constitution of the LRA contrasts sharply with these branding efforts. Rather than an environmental monitoring or regulatory agency, the Lebanese cabinet established the LRA as a para-state agency to attract and administer loans from the World Bank and other international financial institutions in the 1950s.

In August 1955, the World Bank and the government of Lebanon signed their first agreement, for twenty-seven million dollars, to finance the foreign exchange costs for the construction of the Litani Project (Lahoud, 1955). The government of Lebanon signed as guarantor, while the Bank would actually disburse the loan to the LRA. The early Bank's investment strategies restricted them from lending directly to state institutions or private enterprises that lacked the state's guarantee. Parliament established the LRA in 1954 as precisely the kind of institution that could take on a World Bank loan: legally autonomous, but with a board nominated by Lebanon's cabinet (IBRD, 1954; Stephens, 1954). The initial LRA an administrative agency, rather than a technical agency that would actually oversee design or construction. Its first chairman was a civil engineer, as were a number of other board members, but it had no substantial in-house technical division. This was by design. The loan was in US dollars, eligible to be spent only on foreign exchange costs, meaning the LRA could not spend it in Lebanon, and the LRA only received a modest budget from the Lebanese treasury to pay its staff (IBRD, 1955b). The loan conditions required the LRA to contract an internationally respected engineering firm that would prepare the project designs, and contracting firms of similar standing to manage construction. Under Bank oversight, the LRA hired a French consortium to act as consulting engineers and Italian and Yugoslavian contractors (Gibert, 1955; Lahoud, 1958; Rucinski, 1957).

The 1955 Bank loan agreement marked a major watershed in planning for Litani development. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, engineers and investors had proposed dozens of plans to construct hydroelectric, irrigation, and potable water infrastructure on the Litani (Sneddon, 2015: 65–66; Alatout, 2014: 313). Planning intensified after the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel and the Palestinian Nakba. International experts flooded the Eastern Mediterranean seeking to design water projects that could permanently resettle displaced Palestinians in their host countries and/or provide a vehicle for negotiations among the states adjoining the Jordan River (Lowi, 1993: 80–81; Alatout, 2006: 612–613). In 1951, the Lebanese Ministry of Public Works began collaborating with the US Bureau of Reclamation on two Litani research missions coordinated through the Technical Cooperation Administration, the US international assistance program known commonly as Point Four. This collaboration produced the Bureau's 1954 plan for Litani development (USBR, 1954). Through the political efforts of Ibrahim Abd-El-Al, the director of Public Works, Lebanese President Camille Chamoun approved the Bureau plan in July 1954 (Crawford, 1954).

The Ministry of Public Works’ planning for the Litani did not provide democratic channels for community input. The Litani basin was then and remains today an impoverished and politically marginalized agrarian region. For decades, agrarian communities in the basin and across Lebanon had petitioned state institutions to invest in their regions, demanding schools, hospitals, electricity, and, most prominently, water supply for drinking and irrigation (Chalabi, 2006). These communities lacked the institutional mechanisms to hold the Litani planners accountable. However, Public Works’ directors saw urban-rural inequality as among Lebanon's most significant concerns, and they explicitly portrayed the Litani project as a means to achieve a more equal society (Lawson, 2021: 80). Because the Bureau had worked so closely with Public Works, the 1954 plan also sought equal urban-rural benefits through a balance between hydroelectricity generation for urban consumption and rural irrigation infrastructure. That balance was particularly important to achieve because the Bureau plan's electricity infrastructure would exclusively service Beirut, and would not distribute any electricity in rural areas. The 1954 plan divided the project into two phases, reflecting the anticipated costs of construction. Phase “A” would construct the principal hydroelectric infrastructure, which were the project's most profitable components. Using initial profits from those hydroelectricity sales, phase “B” would construct unprofitable rural water distribution in inland rural areas, principally the Litani basin (USBR, 1954: i–ii).

After 1954, the World Bank replaced the Bureau as the primary international institution shaping the Litani project. The Bank's Lebanon team significantly reworked the 1954 plan, scrapping phase “B” entirely, along with all inland water distribution infrastructure. Instead, their plan was “essentially a power project and is justified largely on that basis” (IBRD, 1955a). The loan would fund hydroelectric infrastructure that would generate kilowatt-hours exclusively for Beirut, without distributing any water or electricity to communities in the Litani basin. The Bank's Litani plan fit with its broader strategy in these decades. As Timothy Mitchell describes it, for the early World Bank, irrigation and agriculture were “too localized, too small, and too dependent on forms of social profit for bankers to calculate rates of return and risk” (Mitchell, 2014: 506). State-backed returns from urban hydroelectricity sales were more readily quantifiable than irrigation returns, particularly in the Biqa‘ valley, where researchers had long found formal and vernacular water rights too complex to study.

The 1955 loan agreement defined the Litani project according to the Bank's revised plan. However, the LRA board, like most in Lebanon, still considered inland water distribution essential to the overall project. After the loan was ratified, the LRA instructed the French consulting engineers to prepare construction designs based on the 1954 plan. The Bank intervened, using the leverage afforded by their guarantor agreement to pressure the Lebanese president and cabinet to prevent the LRA from using their funds to pay for any infrastructure not included in the loan agreement (Bochenski and Bolis, 1956; Piccagli, 1956). In 1957, the LRA acquiesced to these pressures, and their French consultants once again removed all inland irrigation from planning (Chadenet, 1957). This established a pattern that would repeat over the following decade, in which successive LRA boards would attempt to divert from the project components defined in the loan agreement, and the Bank would intervene to prevent changes that would alter the fundamental financial justifications. When construction concluded in 1965, the Litani infrastructure consisted of well-functioning hydroelectric plants, but no irrigation structures and no potable water supply. Instead, the hydroelectric system collected the Litani in Lake Qara‘un, and then diverted it out of the Biqa‘ into hydroelectric plants that provided kilowatt-hours exclusively to Beirut.

Since the turn of the century, Lebanese and international engineers had consistently analysed and planned Lebanon's waters in terms of abundance, as Lebanon's most bountiful and important resource (e.g., Abd-El-Al, 1948; Béchara, 1921; Latron, 1936; for comparison, see Swyngedouw, 1999: 453–454). Following a series of delays, construction accidents, and political scandals, by the 1960, the project's costs had ballooned to more than double the initial budget that informed the loan structure. The LRA covered these costs with new treasury allocations and a new loan from the Kuwait Fund for Arab Development (IBRD, 1967). In order to make up these shortfalls, the Bank recognised that the LRA needed to increase its hydroelectricity sales. Along with the LRA's French consulting engineers, the Bank began analysing and planning the Litani's waters in terms of zero-sum scarcity. The LRA continued to plan for some version of phase “B”—inland irrigation and potable water distribution—that would begin after the Bank-funded Litani project completed. The Bank team alternately discouraged or ignored these efforts, preventing any inland irrigation that would reduce the volume of water supplying the power plants they had funded (e.g., Bart, 1963, 1966).

Through these processes, the Bank and LRA effectively monopolised the Litani River and prevented farming communities in the Biqa‘ from drawing any benefit from it. Their monopolisation did not entail formally commodifying the Litani's water, but rather monopolising the river basin as an energy resource. Commodifying the water would have been necessary to sell it to Biqa‘ farmers for irrigation, which would in turn have required the LRA or Bank to more thoroughly engage with basin communities and the rural economy. It may also have entailed a commitment to ensuring basic treatment and standards of water quality. Diverting the water from the Biqa‘ to power hydroelectric generators required no such commitment. The Litani waters could be extracted from Biqa‘ communities without consulting them, and beyond basic filtration, no other standards of water quality were needed to drive turbines.

Instead, the LRA's main economic interest in the Biqa‘ valley was in recreation. The LRA—whose chairman at the time was also the president of Air Liban, part of the tourism industry—partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture in an attempt to make the lake a tourist destination for boating, swimming, and American-style sport fishing. These efforts were the origins of the fish species at the center of 2019's “environmental crimes.” In 1963, the Ministry of Agriculture began importing two hundred thousand rainbow trout eggs annually from the United States. They hatched the eggs in a facility in ‘Anjar and, once the spawn grew into adolescents, released them into Lake Qara‘un (Accaoui, 1966). By 1968, the Ministry had released millions of trout, carp, and salmon into Lake Qara‘un and several hundred thousand more into other rivers (L’Argus de l’économie Libanaise, 1968). Accompanying the fish, the Ministry drafted new regulation to protect the nascent touristic attraction, proposing to issue licenses for recreational fishing in public waters, and to ban pollution and overfishing ( L’Argus, 1967 ). Both of these efforts, to regulate sport fishing and popularize the lake as a tourist destination, foundered before the decade's end (L’Argus de l’économie Libanaise, 1969). But the new fish flourished, eradicated and transformed the previously existing aquatic biodiversity, and provided a cottage industry to Litani basin residents.

Only in 2000 did LRA complete construction of their first, and to date only, irrigation distribution infrastructure in the Biqa‘ valley: the canal 900. Today, the canal pumps highly polluted water from Lake Qara‘un and distributes it north along the banks of the Litani towards Jubb Jannin (Eid-Sabbagh, 2015: 199; Halabi, 2011). Otherwise denied rights to the river and lake, the canal and the fish represented the few resources Litani communities could extract from it, until the escalating pollution of the past decade rendered both hazardous. The material, administrative, and legal reconstitution of the Litani River basin as an energy resource monopolised by the LRA and Bank in the 1960s was a constitutive component of this pattern of organised abandonment. The canal 900 also reflects important transformations in the LRA since the postwar reconstruction period, when it has operated with greater autonomy from the World Bank. However, as the next section shows, the LRA's role as mediator of capitalogenic flows in its early decades set an important precedent for the environmental regulatory institutions established in the 1980s–2000s.

Organised abandonment and Lebanon's environmental regulatory apparatus

The Litani River Authority, presently sixty-eight years old, has undergone significant transformations. It must not be understood as the same institution today that it was during the years of the Litani project (1955–65). During that earlier period, the World Bank's exerted much greater influence that both limited the LRA's autonomy and diminished the influence of other Lebanese institutions on it. After 1959, the LRA began developing a more substantial in-house engineering division, capable of maintaining and expanding their infrastructure. Today, the LRA's substantive engineering and technical corps are personally and professionally committed to building solutions to Lebanon's spectacular water and pollution crises. However, the Litani hydroelectric infrastructure remains the LRA's principal responsibility and a key source of revenue—although that revenue is quite minimal (Farajalla et al., 2018). And the LRA remains a critical vector for international funding (Eid-Sabbagh, 2015, 116).

The new powers granted the LRA in 2018 have made it a pivotal institution in Lebanon's overall environmental regulatory apparatus. That regulatory apparatus is structurally enmeshed in what Eid-Sabbagh (2015) terms Lebanon's international development complex, the overlapping and unequal web of relations among dozens of international funders and Lebanese institutions that produces water governance in Lebanon. This third section of the article will explore interrelated aspects of that regulatory apparatus—laws and institutions governing the environment, water, wastewater, and agricultural inputs—and its imbrication in capital flows, which are critical to the durability of the present ecological catastrophe.

The LRA leadership has found it politically useful to portray its refugee camp demolitions and regulatory actions as efforts to combat “environmental crimes.” However, the LRA is not empowered to enforce Lebanon's environmental protection laws. Environmental law per se is a relatively recent and ineffectual category of legislation and prosecution in Lebanon. Following the civil and proxy wars commonly referred to collectively as the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990), the civil and paramilitary groups that recomposed Lebanon's government founded the Environment Ministry in 1993. The government's first major legislation organized using the term “environment” emerged in 2000, culminating in the 2002 Environmental Protection Act. In 2016, a new decree established a special “Environmental Police” unit under the Environment Ministry. This force has limited staff and powers, largely restricting itself to policing litter in urban public areas—itself, of course, an aspect of the institutional fragmentation that produced a waste crisis in 2015 and, in response, the “You Stink” environmental justice protests (Abu-Rish, 2016). Since that moment of waste crisis, Lebanon's Ministry of Justice has appointed and empowered public prosecutors and investigative judges to pursue environmental law cases (Human Rights Watch, 2019). However, such cases require significant informal political backing to proceed, and accountability for injustice, environmental or otherwise, is in short supply.

As noted in the introduction, what the LRA is actually enforcing are water laws. Water laws have a much longer history in Lebanese legislation, beginning with the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman civil code (mecelle) and French Mandate laws that asserted state control over all major watercourses and the coast as public property (Riachi, 2013: 89). Laws against pollution of public waters were enacted in the mid-1970s (Ghiotti and Riachi, 2014). Since 2000, a series of legislative decrees have assigned responsibility for wastewater treatment and pollution to municipalities and to polluting industries, on a polluter-pays framework (El Amine, 2019; Riachi, 2016). During the postwar reconstruction period, reforms of water administration restricted the LRA's operations (Eid-Sabbagh, 2015: 140). In the early 2000s, the LRA regained some of its stature and renewed powers through its partnership with the CDR in planning the expansive South Lebanon irrigation scheme known as the Canal 800. This project, whose completion status today remains unclear, was supported by a hundreds of millions of dollars from the Arab Fund (Arab Fund, 2015). The 2018 Water Law marked a significant expansion of the LRA's jurisdiction to include enforcing these laws, which had not previously been among its responsibilities.

The LRA leadership has emphasized that its enforcement of these polluter-pays laws, through its ticketing program, has been its most significant achievement of the past few years (Darwish, 2023; Pernot and Succari, 2023). The LRA has sued slaughterhouses, dairies, and vineyards openly dumping their waste, as well as the institutions that they and Lebanese state institutions hold responsible for managing informal refugee camps: the UNHCR, Oxfam, and World Vision. While some of the commercial polluters substantially altered their practices to minimize waste discharge into the river, others have likely circumvented or ignored the rulings (Farajalla, 2023).

When the LRA gained these new powers of water policing, their leadership also pivoted to portraying it as a “green” environmental agency. In part, the LRA's rebranding reflects the fundamental changes the institution has undergone since the decades of the Litani project, and its engineers’ commitment to resolving a terrible ecological crisis. However, given the LRA's ongoing role as an intermediary for capitalogenic flows, this rebranding may also be read as a strategy of greenwashing in service of rent-seeking. ³ If so, that strategy would be consistent with the World Bank itself. A decade ago, the Bank pivoted to advertising itself as the financial engine for “green, clean, resilient” paths for growth in developing countries (Awe, 2012). Under this strategy, the Bank has expanded funding for fossil-fuel projects, portrayed investments as climate-oriented that have no clear relationship to climate mitigation, and grossly exaggerated the size of its climate finance portfolio (Mainhardt, 2023; Núñez-Mujica et al., 2023; Oxfam, 2022).

These dynamics raise significant concerns about the World Bank's involvement in the cleanup of the Litani basin. In 2014, the Lebanese parliament announced a plan to cleanup the Litani and Qara‘un, which would cost $730 million US dollars with loans provided the World Bank and the European Union. That project never materialized (Shaheen, 2014). In 2021, the Lebanese Environment Ministry renewed talks with the World Bank for a $250 million dollar loan to begin Litani cleanup. A new partnership has begun between the World Bank and the LRA to renovate sewage treatment facilities in the Biqa‘ and cleanup the Litani, again predicated on new flows of donor funding (al-Akhbar, 2021).

The recent history of donor-funded wastewater treatment infrastructure vividly demonstrates how these large influxes produce minimal tangible benefit in practice. Since 1993, massive international development loans facilitated the construction of sixty wastewater plants and thirty rural sewage treatment plants, including important centers in the Biqa‘ like Zahle and Jubb Jannin. Eid-Sabbagh (2023: 613) estimates that over USD $1 billion have been invested in wastewater treatment since 1991, just over half of which from international donors. Riachi (2016: 31) reveals that essentially none of these facilities were functional by 2016, not due to technical failure, but due to institutional fragmentation and financial mismanagement. Responsibility for these facilities is distributed among a number of nominally public institutions. In the Biqa‘, the LRA negotiates and coordinates its actions with the Ministry of Energy and Water, the Council for Reconstruction and Development, the Biqa‘ Water Establishment, and municipal councils (Farajalla, 2023; Farajalla et al., 2018). Different elite political factions control each institution and use them as means to attract funding from their respective regional and international backers, capture those income streams, and distribute those resources within their business networks in the form of state contracts and to their working-class clients in the form of small-scale and local investments (Eid-Sabbagh, 2023: 610–12; Verdeil, 2018: 93–98). These corrupt dynamics characterise Lebanon's archipelago of unaccountable governing institutions in the post-Civil War period (see Leenders, 2012; Khneisser, 2019; Thebian, 2020).

The final aspect of environmental regulation and accumulation explored in this section are agricultural inputs, a critical component of the present ecological catastrophe in the basin. As described in the first section, the constitution of Lebanon's archipelago of state institutions hampered or prevented systematic planning of the agricultural sector, including the provision of cheap credit or other basic measures to sustain and expand smallholding and sharecropping. While the Biqa‘ valley had been incorporated into global markets before the turn of the twentieth century (Alff, 2018; Pitts, 2018), the Litani project years marked a significant new chapter in the expansion and cementation of capitalist social relations in agrarian Lebanon. The collapse of the agricultural sector in the 1950s and 1960s facilitated the consolidation of large estates, and a concomitant intensification of agricultural production, with yields in South Lebanon and the Bekaa increasing multiple fold (Nasr, 1978: 6). Increased yields relied upon imported fertilizers and pesticides, making Lebanese farmers newly reliant on international flows of agricultural inputs. However, Lebanese state institutions did not monitor the importation, regulate the use, or advise on the proper application of these inputs during the Litani project years. The government established the first organisational framework for fertilizers and pesticides in 1968, more than two decades after Lebanon's independence from France (Republic of Lebanon, 1968). Parliament established the first regulatory framework for the importation of pesticides in 1982 (Salameh et al., 2004).

In the absence of agricultural input regulations, agricultural businesses widely applied powerful pesticides and fungicides throughout the Litani basin. In the late 1960s, the most common were DDT, parathion, carbaryl, lead arsenate, and dithiocarbamate, all of which most countries have since banned due to their acute toxicity to humans and other species and their persistent contamination (Kawar and Dagher, 1976). However, countrywide application of DDT for mosquito control—including spraying watercourse banks—began in 1956, under the auspices the WHO's global malaria eradication initiative, and continued for nearly two decades (De Zulueta and Muir, 1972). Agribusiness also commonly applied chemical fertilisers excessively and inappropriately. Minimal import controls also enabled the dominance of fertiliser imports by two Lebanese firms in the 1970s, who exploited their market position to charge exorbitant rates (Nasr, 1978: 8).

As part of cleanup efforts during the postwar reconstruction, the Ministry of Agriculture issued new lists and regulations of forbidden pesticides in 1992. However, control over imports and enforcement of regulations against application remained weak, with banned products routinely available and applied (Salameh et al., 2004). While formal mechanisms to regulate the import of pesticides and fertilizers existed, no effective enforcement mechanisms were in place regarding use. Farmers and agribusiness applied as much as two or three times the recommended amount of fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, some agricultural soil remains contaminated by persistent pesticides applied prior to the reform period, potentially including DDT (Amacha and Baydoun, 2018: 95).

These minimal controls on agricultural input importation and application were a contributing factor in the 2020 Beirut Port Explosion. In August 2020, nearly three thousand tons of ammonium nitrate—one of the most common agricultural fertilisers—exploded in Beirut's port, killing 218 people, injuring over seven thousand, displacing over three hundred thousand, and devastating the city (Human Rights Watch, 2021). The port had warehoused the ammonium nitrate since 2014. In the intervening years, multiple inspections of the stored fertilisers recorded that it was improperly and hazardously stored, with sacks damaged and spilling, the warehouse was improperly secured, and that flammable and explosive materials were stored alongside the highly volatile chemicals (Human Rights Watch, 2021). This history of persistently weak regulation of agricultural input importation and application is a causal force that links two of Lebanon's most dire contemporary catastrophes—the Litani and the Beirut Port Explosion—within a political ecology of organised abandonment.

Conclusion

Contemporary causal explanations of the Litani basin's ecological catastrophe, like much analysis of contemporary Lebanon, commonly begin with the post-Civil War reconstruction and reform period. This article has traced longer historical trajectories of multiple causal threads contributing to the particular conditions of Lake Qara‘un today and broader patterns of infrastructural and environmental decay evident in Lebanon's water, agriculture, and refuse systems. Historical analysis of the constitution of this ecological-political conjucture is essential in the context of Lebanon's institutionalized historical amnesia. Tracing that longer history identifies recurrent patterns of organised abandonment of Lebanon's rural hinterland, powerfully reliant on and determined by the interests of international finance capital, regional investors, and Lebanese institutional formations. The creation of markets for contaminated fish and the LRA's destruction of Syrian refugee homes can be understood manifestations of this history of state-formation and ecological devastation. Both are symptomatic of the Litani basin's particular history of resource extraction, capitalogenic flows, and organised abandonment that is distinct from the better-understood histories of places and communities that were subject to structural adjustment after the 1970s.

Highlights

Lebanon's present ecological catastrophe derives from the historical constitution of Lebanon's environmental regulatory institutions as mediators for capitalogenic flows