Between 1951–55, the US Bureau of Reclamation conducted research in Lebanon to plan a hydroelectric and irrigation scheme using Lebanon's largest river, the Litani. Their research would later form the basis of the Litani project, Lebanon's largest development scheme until the 1990s. In the shadow of that project, communities in the Litani River basin worked to enroll these US technical assistance researchers and their technologies into fulfilling their urgent needs for potable water. This article argues that these enrollments comprised ‘vernacular development’, a highly contingent, bottom-up strategy that the intended subjects of development deployed in their encounters with agents of international development. Vernacular development was a mode of interaction that interrupted and subverted the technological and temporal framework animating midcentury international development. That framework promised elaborate works in the future, which almost never materialized. Through vernacular development strategies, Litani communities identified their own material needs and goals and experimented with strategies to enroll international researchers into attaining them. They derived these strategies from their experience with successive imperial and corporate planning missions that had come and gone in the decades prior to the postwar development era. Exploring hitherto unexamined agrarian sources in the US National Archives, this article contributes to the historiography of international development and the postcolonial Middle East.

This article was a chance for me to experiment with the methods of historical political ecology. 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.

This article won the 2023 Martha Trescott prize from the Society for the History of Technology. It writes engineers into the history of Lebanese political-economic thought. Historians of Lebanon’s post-independence period have emphasized how a narrow, elite “consortium” espoused a national ideology that authorized laissez-faire monetary and trade policies. These intellectuals and businessmen invoked environmental determinism to claim that trade, tourism, and services were Lebanon’s national vocation. This article reveals that engineers formed an influential and under-examined counter- current advocating statist developmentalism. Engineer-bureaucrats saw the post-independence era as an opportunity to claim their professions’ status and redefine bourgeois culture and its relationship to governing institutions according to their conceptions of modernity. By reinterpreting the consortium’s environmental narrative of Lebanese history, the hydrological engineer Ibrahim Abd-El-Al portrayed rational development of water resources and agriculture as an organic expression of national identity. These efforts cultivated a critical and technically literate reading public that favored statism, and shaped how that public understood their national subjectivity and relationship to the natural world.