A life exploring blind corners

Tony Allan graduated with a first in geography from Durham University in 1958, into a world very different from today. Much was expected of governments that controlled the commanding heights of their economies, the United Nations and their agencies. And in those days we all believed in planning. It was appreciated at the highest level that to meet the challenges of the day we need intelligence at the point of decision about the location of resources, their condition and how this is changing – so there was plenty of work for geographers.

For his national service, 1959–61, Tony Allan was posted to Aden and Oman to lead a survey team which, at the time, entailed demanding fieldwork with optical instruments. Advances in aerial photography and photogrammetry soon carried our viewpoint from 6 feet above the ground to 6000 or 10,000 feet; the stereoscope provided the three-dimensional perspective of an eagle; and false-colour film sensitive to the infrared waveband revealed details that even eagles cannot see. Then, in 1972, the first Earth resources satellite offered repeat global mapping at a resolution of 80 m. Tony Allan, who had joined the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in 1966, was in the thick of it. But all the satellite could see was light reflected from the Earth’s surface; when it came to surveys of soil and water resources, pretty pictures of clouds, treetops or desert sands have their limitations. Few of us imagined the further advances to come and the brilliant tweaks of interpretation reported in this issue by Wim Bastiannssen and colleagues.

Through Durham, his national service and his new home at SOAS, Tony Allan focused on the Middle East. With his lifelong friend Keith McLachlan and Edith Penrose, he edited Libya: Agricultural Economy and Development (1973), followed by further perceptive contributions to regional geography – but the chronic shortage of water claimed increasingly more of his attention. When it came to water, Tony Allan always considered himself an amateur, but he could see the big picture: water obeys physical laws that operate whether or not we will it, but events that control what happens to that water are driven by societal laws which operate by consent – and can change. So his weltanschauung grew to encompass not only geography and environmental sciences but also the subtleties of political economy.

Gifted with curiosity and imagination, the life scientific was as exciting as a ride through London in his Citroën 2CV. His humanity shone through in his teaching and his appreciation of the cardinal role of people, as individuals and societies, and the real-life outcomes of the issues he was investigating; the tangled web of transboundary water and water hegemony; and his espousal of the embedded water in crops, that is, the water consumed to produce the ultimate harvest, which he translated into the concept of virtual water (Allan, 1993). Tony Allan rehearsed the political economy of virtual water using the Middle East as a case study (Allan, 2001), but its wider applicability to the global food trade and geopolitics was recognized by the award of the Stockholm Water Prize in 2008. The Nobel Peace Prize would have been equally appropriate: it takes 500–4000 tons of water to produce a ton of grain, so countries short of water do well to import food rather than going to war over disputed water resources to grow their own. Moreover, it takes 4500–15,500 tons of water to produce a ton of meat: Tony became vegetarian.

His thinking was framed by five successive water paradigms (Figure 1): (1) relatively small-scale pre-modern, water development; (2) the hydraulic mission, characterized in the West and the Soviet Bloc by big engineering projects in the mid-20th century; and (3–5) then, successively from the 1970s, environmental reflexivity, economic reflexivity seeking to reallocate water through economic instruments and, finally in the new millennium, political and institutional reflexivity which recognized the need for fundamental changes in resource management and governance to actually achieve reallocation.

Figure 1. Five successive water paradigms. Source: Allan (2003).

Big engineering projects are still in favour in the Global South, while arguments rage in the Global North. Tony Allan adapted Mary Douglas’s ways of life analysis (Douglas, 1970) (Figure 2) to map out the different camps, their rationales and the tensions between them: fatalistic (essentially conforming, and adopted by most of society most of the time); hierarchists (conforming and controlling, e.g., .gov); entrepreneurs (not controlling, non-conforming, e.g., .com); and ethicists (controlling and non-conforming, e.g., .org).

Figure 2. Ways of life analysis. Source: Allan (2003).

This framework helped to explain why resource managers continued to ‘do the wrong thing extremely well’ (Allan, 2011). It also explained the need for institutional and political reflexivity to allow different voices to be heard and for negotiation between competing claims. The balance of forces, combined with social and political and environmental shocks, also helped explain why pathways might regress after attempts to do the right thing, and it might take several cycles to achieve a sustained trajectory.

Observation of the dynamics of power informed Tony Allan’s work from the global food system and transboundary waters to national and local agriculture, water and environment. He tried to engage with all sides, deploying his own power of communicating complex ideas in popular terms to engage with political, social and financial processes and people – characteristically with one-liners such as ‘water flows uphill to money and power’ (Reisner, 1986). There were no bounds to this engagement; one of the most telling of the tributes that follow is from Carl Hausmann, chief executive officer (CEO) of Bunge: ‘I was first impressed by his gentle courtesy and rather quaint appearance. However very quickly I said to myself: “He knows something that I must learn more about.”’

Tony Allan’s early years during the fatalistic era of the Cold War saw the power of government and the private sector in mobilizing natural resources; and his work in remote sensing and geographical information systems (GIS) was arguably on the technical frontier of this era. He lived through the rise of environmentalism and then unfettered neoliberalism when the market was king; and he saw the failure of each successive paradigm to achieve its desired ends. This led him to reflexivity: the need for an alternative to the domination of one or other ideology to the exclusion of others, exemplified in one of his favourite arguments that solutions to water security lie beyond the water sector (Allan, 2009, 2011) and by his late-career shift of focus from water to the food system – as the sector in which society manages most of its water (Allan et al., 2019). All this threw up challenges for his beloved Labour Party and bred frustration with radicals whose political philosophy he shared but who lacked the reflexivity to bridge multiple ways of life and build a platform for power. And frustration with business leaders: ‘These people know all about investment and operational risks; they know the reasons for market failure; they curse the darkness – but where is the candle to illuminate the reason why we have the current accounting rules and legal regime?’ (Allan & Dent, 2021, p. 15). Surely, he underestimated the power of his own brief candle in the dark.

Following Stephen Lintner’s affectionate recollections in Tony here! we have arranged contributions from many friends, colleagues and students in a rough order of the appearance of these topics on the world stage. In this issue we cover the topics highlighted below.

1966–90: The early SOAS years – remote sensing and regional geography

Tim Hessels, Geoff Davids and Wim Bastiaanssen bring the water aspects of remote sensing up to date with ‘Scalable water balances from Earth observations: results from 50 years of remote sensing in hydrology’. Salem Maiar recalls ‘Professor Tony Allan and Libya’, going back to the Libya–London University Joint Research Project, the country’s metamorphosis to a republic and its uncompromising commitment to the Great Man-made River Project piping groundwater from beneath the Sahara to the northern coastal belt. Tony Allan was always concerned whether any government of Libya would grasp the nature of the political economy of water security and invest accordingly. Chibli Mallat writes ‘Of intellectual friendship in fin-de-siècle London’, recalling Tony Allan’s subtle collegiality, promoting multidisciplinary scholarship that initially focused on the tangled issues of land, water, people and politics of the Middle East, but which turned out to have worldwide implications for law, food and water, war and peace.

The 1990s: the political economy of water and virtual water

Munther Haddadin’s ‘Recollections of a peacemaker’ record that Tony Allan became involved in the Middle East Peace Process in 1991 and the concept of virtual water, itself, has been a peacemaker. In ‘Sanctioned discourse and the power of hegemonic imaginings’, Charles Tripp observes that that hegemonic power is exercised not only through the material power of those able to make the rules and authorize what can and cannot be said, but also through censorship invisible to those immersed in the discourse – that they take for granted – and so are unaware of the implicit inequality and domination. Appreciation of this invisible power opens up an examination of the rules, spoken and unspoken, written and unwritten, that govern the content, boundaries and forms of sanctioned discussion, and the forces that may contest it.

Thirty years ago, water wars did not seem improbable. Greg Shapland comments on ‘How virtual water saved the Middle East from water wars’. In the event, Middle Eastern regimes concluded that it was less risky – and cheaper – to import the food they needed rather than go to war to secure a bigger share of local water resources so as to grow it themselves. Anders Jägerskog and Jan Lundqvist sum up the new perspective in ‘Water wars, conflict and cooperation – how the virtual water concept helped change the discourse’. But the smooth running of the world food system cannot be taken for granted. The fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine has demonstrated that a block on even one major exporter steeply increases the price temporarily.

2001–10: transboundary water wrangles

Egypt’s water requirements now far outstrip its allocation of Nile waters. In ‘From zero-sum to variable-sum on the Nile’, John Waterbury comments that, at first sight, Egypt and Sudan are doomed to a zero-sum contest. The geography is immutable, the politics inscrutable, but the concept of virtual water embedded in food imports and exports has released variable-sum alternatives to head-to-head conflict. In knowledgeable detail, Stephan Brichieri-Colombi assesses ‘Egypt’s water balancing act’: the implications, and measures that would allow Egypt to cohabit with its co-riparians as they implement their own plans to use Nile waters. Egypt is grappling with its water scarcity more through actions in the wider economy than through integrated water resource management, and must continue to do so to reduce its vulnerability as the lowest riparian. In ‘Contested baselines and transboundary water resources management, with illustrations from the Nile’, Dale Whittington presents three kinds of problem that confront policy analysts in specifying dynamic baselines against which their assessment of alternative futures should be measured: unexamined baselines, a failure to grasp the need for a dynamic baseline; uncertain baselines, a failure to agree on how to account for uncertainties in the forecast of the dynamic baseline; and contested baselines, a failure to agree on the dynamic baseline because of disagreements over whether the status quo or some alternative is a fair and reasonable basis for the baseline – such disagreement can arise from feelings of past injustices and their resulting perception of unfair or unequitable resource allocation. From the headwaters of the Nile basin, Alan Nicol, Liza Debevec and the late Samuel Okene Ayaru consider ‘Water and complex problemsheds in Karamoja, Uganda’, small-water issues that are, nonetheless, big issues in the region. In response to growing resource pressures, donors and the Ugandan government are investing in new surface-water sources to help ease competition for resources. However, power and political economy issues embedded within these resource–use relationships are rarely factored into water infrastructure development, leading to ill-advised governance.

None of the above issues exercises an absolute ruler. Elie Elhadj’s commentary ‘Ozymandeas. Folly in the desert’ analyses Saudi Arabia’s experiment in grain self-sufficiency. Between 1980 and 2018, irrigation consumed around 700 bcm of groundwater – most of it non-renewable. If the aquifers had supplied only drinking and household water, some 4.4 bcm could have been saved in 2018 alone: instead, almost 5.2 bcm of virtual water was exported to neighbouring states in that year, capping a trend that started more than 20 years earlier. Elie Elhadj scrutinizes the cost in terms of water, money and environmental damage, how the decision to irrigate the desert was made, and whom might have benefited.

Richard Schofield considers wrangles along several international boundaries drawn along rivers in ‘Locating the channel and other tales from the river bank: constants and change in river boundary delimitation’. The very names – the Shatt al-Arab, Jordan, Chobe and Bahr al-Arab – spell trouble that might have been avoided. Finally, Mark Zeitoun leads a cohort of Tony Allan’s former colleagues considering ‘Power plus: Tony Allan’s contributions to understanding transboundary water arrangements’. A suite of theory and analytical frames within the field of political economy originated from Tony Allan’s mainstreaming of power as a determining factor in the control of transboundary flows. These include hydro-hegemony, coexisting conflict and cooperation and, most recently, virtual water rivers. These contributions are exemplified briefly through cases from around the globe and in greater depth through application to the Nile, and in a research agenda to carry them forward.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.