A critique of water scarcity discourses in educational policy and textbooks in Jordan

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the representation of water scarcity in Jordanian textbooks to understand its role on improving education on environmental sustainability. People's understanding of an issue guides their actions toward finding and implementing appropriate solutions to what they perceive as a problem. Discourses are key in constructing people's understanding of issues, in this case, water scarcity. This article shows the role of textbooks and of the educational system in constructing a discourse of water scarcity that frames the issue as due to nature, to neighboring countries, and to refugees. It then demonstrates how this framing opens and drives toward supply-side solutions and discusses to what extent the representations of water scarcity strive to achieve a better education on environmental sustainability.

KEYWORDS:

• Discourse analysis
• educational policy
• Jordan
• textbooks
• water scarcity

Notes

1. As of 2005, according to FAO. 2014. AQUASTAT database, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).

2. This is further discussed in the section on “Analysis.”

3. In the analysis section, there is more information on the textbooks analyzed and on the sample of interviewees.

4. Unaccounted for Water (UFW) is water produced by a provider but not billed due to losses, illegal uses, and wrong metering. Instead, NRW includes UFW plus authorized unbilled uses such as uses for public buildings, firefighting, etc. In the case of Jordan most reports use NRW rather than UFW. For this reason, it is more practical to consider NRW rather than UFW for the scope of this research.