Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 30, Issue 8, November 2011, Pages 450-460
Political Geography

The Cold War, the US Bureau of Reclamation, and the technopolitics of river basin development, 1950–1970

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.09.005Get rights and content

Abstract

This paper examines the links between Cold War geopolitics and economic development to explain the relatively rapid proliferation of the concept of river basin development throughout so-called “developing areas” of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America during the latter half of the twentieth century. The research focuses on the United States Bureau of Reclamation, the most significant water resource development agency of the US government, and its engagement in what it termed “foreign activities” beginning in the aftermath of World War II. Grounded in recent work on technopolitics, the constructed scales of water resource development, and histories of the “global” Cold War, this research examines the advancement of water resource development in the Litani River basin in Lebanon—as guided by staff of the US Bureau of Reclamation—during the period from 1950 to 1970. The Bureau operated as a geopolitical agent attempting to implement a universalized model of river basin development, but encountered continuous difficulties in the form of political and biophysical contingencies. The Bureau’s efforts, centred on the basin as the most appropriate unit of development, were consistently undercut by scale-making projects related to global and regional geopolitical concerns. The research concludes that understandings of the technopolitics of development interventions would benefit from a closer engagement with recent discussions regarding the construction of spatial scale within political geography and related fields. River basin development and its material transformation of multiple locales remains one of the largely neglected, but vitally important, legacies of Cold War geopolitics.

Highlights

► Processes of Cold War geopolitics and economic development are tightly linked. ► The concept of river basin development proliferated throughout the third world. ► The United States Bureau of Reclamation was a key agent of this dissemination. ► The case of the Litani River basin reveals the Bureau’s role in geopolitics. ► Technopolitics is a vital conceptual tool to interpret the Litani and similar cases.

Section snippets

Introduction: “reclamation has gone global”

Writing in 1951 following a global tour of the Middle East and Asia, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Michael Straus observed that the “underdeveloped regions” were “an area of new governments and an awakening people…[with] widespread poverty and concentrated wealth, with tremendous unharnessed natural resources.” Unsurprisingly, Straus perceived reclamation—“bringing water to irrigate land and produce vital food and hydroelectric power to lighten the burden of toil and create industry”—as

Technopolitics and “scale-making projects” in river basin development

At the centre of our research is the complex co-production of technology and politics characteristic of numerous Cold War-era efforts initiated in the US to apply technical and social scientific knowledge to the combined geopolitical and economic problems of the post-World War II era (see Barnes and Farish, 2006, Gilman, 2003, Latham, 2000). Technopolitics as explicated by Mitchell (2002) refers to novel hybrids of technical expertise and political power emerging during the general era of

The Bureau of Reclamation and globalization of the “modern” river basin ideal

As Molle (2009: p. 492) notes in a perceptive and comprehensive history of the idea, the concept of the river basin “draws its strength from its ‘naturalness’ as a hydrologic and management unit,” in spite of the fact that in many instances the river basin is also a social “construct” in that it is put to use, especially by states and other resource management entities, to achieve certain political and ideological ends. And these goals can shift over time and, as our research shows, space.

The “Arab TVA”: developing the Litani

While there are dozens of relevant examples of countries, regions and river basins where the Bureau of Reclamation played a critical role in disseminating the ideologies, practices and knowledge associated with large dams and river basin development, we focus here on the Litani River basin in Lebanon, the site of concentrated Bureau activity from 1951 to 1957.7 We provide a detailed account of how and why the Litani River, a relatively obscure basin amidst its more well-known Middle Eastern

Conclusion: river basin development as technopolitics

US-sponsored technical assistance programs in the form of river basin development initiatives initiated under the guidance of the Bureau of Reclamation and targeted at the world’s ‘underdeveloped’ regions constitute one of the critical yet largely forgotten legacies of the Cold War. The large dams and technical expertise that proliferated during this period were accompanied by the idea of what we call the “modern” river basin, a model of water resource development that was consolidated within

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