Vernacular development, drought, and US technical assistance in postcolonial Lebanon

Abstract

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. The 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.