Water and resilience research in the Middle East

The Middle East region faces numerous challenges, including environmental degradation, socio-political fragility, and population growth. Furthermore, risks related to climatic change, natural hazards, and human–made catastrophes are accumulating and threatening various basic supply sectors, including water. This review examines a growing number of academic publications on the resilience of water systems. First, it highlights research directions, methods, sectors, and risks, and summarizes water resilience determinants. Secondly, it shows how the water resilience field remains dominated by technocratic approaches centered on modeling, vulnerability assessment, and infrastructure performance. Thirdly, it argues for a broader research agenda that links resilience to governance, water insecurity, and socially differentiated vulnerability. Overall, the water resilience literature in the Middle East has generated valuable knowledge on the vulnerability of water resources, and the legacies of community adaptation. Floods, droughts, conflicts, and earthquakes are prominent risks, but there is a need to broaden the scope of such risks, expand the range of cases analyzed, and focus on concrete shocks. More social science-based research is also needed to move away from the dominance of technical and infrastructure-centered resilience research and reflect broader political-economic conditions of knowledge production, including state-centered water governance, donor priorities, and institutional capacity constraints.