Jordan’s water scarcity prompted a national plan whereby treated wastewater is utilized to amend agricultural irrigation water so as to reallocate freshwater to urban/domestic uses. The policy, however, has engendered farmers’ resistance in the Northern Jordan Valley (NJV), causing a stalemate in putting new infrastructure into operation. This research investigated the socio-economic causes of farmer resistance and contestation, and examined the government’s institutional approach to overcome the challenges. We found that the perceived risks of wastewater reuse such as salinization and restrictions from international markets figure prominently in the farmers resistance. As yet, farmers have managed to avoid the shift to treated wastewater use by using the political agency of elite farmers who control the Water Users Associations. These same farmers have adopted informal water access practices to overcome freshwater shortages. At the same time, small producers who don’t have possibilities to access extra water and with less political clout seem more willing to irrigate with treated wastewater. We conclude that understanding the heterogeneous context in which the envisioned wastewater users operate is key to predicting and solving conflicts that arise in treated wastewater reuse projects.

Wastewater reuse is identified as strategic to help ameliorate scarcity in water-stressed regions around the world. However, to develop it, there is a need to better understand the social, institutional and technological contexts in which it takes place. This article develops a novel socio-technical framework to inform such an analysis and applies it to current wastewater reuse in Egypt. Our analysis highlights the different actors, management activities and practices that shape wastewater collection, transfer, treatment, discharge and/or reuse in different social, technological and environmental contexts in Egypt. It points out bottlenecks of current wastewater reuse policies and programmes.

Egypt’s quota of Nile River water has been constant since the 1950s, despite the continual agricultural land expansion. To facilitate land reclamation, Egypt has reallocated Nile water from downstream users, mostly smallholders in the ‘old lands’ of the Delta. As water demands have grown, more attention has gone to the reuse of waste/drainage water as a reliable source for irrigated agriculture in the “old lands”. Recently, new mega plants for drainage water treatment have been built to promote reclamation of ‘new lands’ in desert-front governorates located outside the Nile Delta. Through these plants and the related water conveyance infrastructure, drainage water from the ‘old lands’ is now being collected, treated, and reallocated to these newly reclaimed areas. This article scrutinizes this transformation of access to drainage water, examining who benefits and what implications it holds for smallholder farmers in the old lands. The analysis suggests that waste/drainage water reclamation schemes do not tap into unused water but actually risk depriving smallholders in the Nile Delta of water access. It argues that more attention should be given to existing informal reuse arrangements and that smallholders’ access to water is guaranteed in light of new drainage water reuse projects.