IWRM and Neo-Colonial Power In Syria: Between Reform And Instrumentalization

Over the past months, I have explored how Syria exposes the practical and political limits of integrated water resources management (IWRM), and how narratives of “mismanagement” and “blame” can obscure deeper questions of water sovereignty and responsibility in the country’s food security crisis. Building on those earlier reflections, this article asks a sharper question:

has IWRM itself operated, intentionally or not, as a neo‑colonial tool in Syria (before and after the conflict), and what would a genuinely de‑colonial IWRM pathway look like?

Seen through a neo‑colonial lens, IWRM in and around Syria appears less as a neutral “best practice” and more as a potential vehicle through which powerful states, financial institutions, and expert communities can shape Syrian policy space, often in ways that reflect external priorities more than local social‑ecological realities.

IWRM, Neocolonialism, and the Syrian Context

The concept of IWRM emerged in the 1990s as a global paradigm promising integrated, basin‑scale, participatory and efficiency‑oriented management of land, surface and groundwater resources. While it explicitly sought to integrate ecological and social considerations, its operationalization in many contexts relied on standardized templates, policy toolkits, and institutional designs promoted by multilateral banks, UN agencies, and technical cooperation agencies, which were often transplanted with limited adaptation to local institutional histories.

UNESCO’s recent assessments of water governance in the Arab region note that progress on IWRM and governance remains low in many countries, including Syria, despite decades of externally supported reform discourse. These reviews also stress that meaningful participation in water decision-making, especially of women and marginalized groups, remains weak; and that education and training programs are not yet enabling all genders to influence policy and governance structures in practice. At the same time, UNESCO’s work on financing and investment underlines that several of the region’s least developed and conflict‑affected countries are highly exposed to water scarcity, especially in agriculture, and are therefore heavily dependent on external financing and technical assistance in the water sector. This structural dependence creates conditions in which technical frameworks such as IWRM can become vehicles for policy conditionalities and normative transfer, echoing classic patterns of neo‑colonial influence where control is exercised through expertise, debt and reform packages rather than direct territorial rule.

Syria’s trajectory fits uneasily within this regional picture. Prior to the conflict, the Syrian state pursued an ambitious modernization agenda, including large‑scale irrigation and dam projects, while also beginning to adopt the language of “integrated” management and demand‑side efficiency in its national planning documents. At the same time, transboundary dynamics with Türkiye, particularly around the Euphrates and Tigris, have been a central axis of Syrian water politics, and hydro‑diplomacy has been repeatedly disrupted by geopolitical tensions and, later, war. The suspension of bilateral cooperation between Syria and Türkiye after 2011 illustrates how conflict can abruptly interrupt technical cooperation and expose the geopolitics beneath seemingly neutral IWRM and data‑sharing initiatives. Against this backdrop, the question of whether IWRM has been used (or could be used) as a colonial instrument in Syria becomes a question about who defines integration, who benefits from “reform,” and whose knowledge counts when international actors engage in the Syrian water policy.

Pre‑Conflict IWRM: Reform Template Or Colonial Tool?

Before the 2011 uprising and subsequent war, Syria had already been exposed to the global diffusion of IWRM through regional initiatives, UN programs, and the policy discourse of international financial institutions. UNESCO’s overview of the Arab region highlights that, on paper, many states had begun to adopt IWRM principles, yet the depth of implementation remained limited and often superficial, consisting more of planning documents and pilot projects than of thorough shifts in power relations or institutional cultures. In Syria, this mirrored a broader pattern of state‑led modernization, in which water policy remained highly centralized and securitized, and participatory mechanisms were tightly constrained. Internationally promoted IWRM frameworks were thus layered onto an existing authoritarian governance structure, with limited space for local communities, small farmers, or civil society to shape outcomes meaningfully.

Scholars of Middle East water governance emphasize that external actors, including development banks and Western and Gulf donors, have promoted concepts such as virtual water, water pricing reforms, and public‑private partnerships as part of a broader toolkit of “modern” water policy for the region. The concept of virtual water (water embedded in traded goods) has been particularly influential in arguing that water‑short states should shift cropping patterns and rely more on trade, which aligns with trade liberalization agendas favored by international financial institutions. In pre‑conflict Syria, the move away from heavily subsidized, water‑intensive crops such as cotton and wheat was periodically floated in policy circles, but these debates were shaped as much by external narratives about efficiency as by domestic concerns about rural livelihoods and food security. The fact that these ideas often came bundled with broader structural adjustment and trade liberalization programs raises the question of whether IWRM served as a discursive bridge through which shifts in Syrian political economy were encouraged in directions congruent with external interests.

A helpful comparative lens comes from World Bank and GIZ engagement in neighboring Yemen, where IWRM was explicitly embedded in donor‑led basin plans such as the Sana’a Basin IWRM initiative and broader water sector damage assessments and reform programs. These reports reveal how integrated water management became a vehicle for restructuring utilities, introducing cost recovery, and prioritizing certain uses of water, often aligned with fiscal sustainability goals and debt management considerations. While Yemen and Syria differ in important ways, the Yemen experience demonstrates how IWRM can be operationalized as part of a package of technocratic reforms that carry implicit conditionalities and can reinforce external influence over national policy trajectories. This demonstrates a general mechanism through which IWRM can act as a neo‑colonial tool: by tying access to finance and technical support to the adoption of particular institutional models, pricing policies, and allocation rules.

In Syria’s pre‑conflict context, a similar dynamic played out more subtly through donor‑funded technical assistance, regional training programs, and pilot projects that propagated specific models of basin organizations, water information systems, and participatory councils. However, the depth of Syrian state control over strategic sectors and the geopolitical frictions with some donors meant that water reforms were negotiated and selectively adopted rather than fully imposed. It is therefore more accurate to say that IWRM operated as a soft template for modernization, opening channels for external expertise and discursive influence, rather than as a fully fledged colonial instrument in the classic sense. Yet this does not negate the neo‑colonial critique; it simply locates it in the subtler terrain of norm diffusion, capacity‑building, and the framing of “good” water governance.

Syria’s Water Future

In closing, this piece has argued that IWRM in Syria sits uneasily between promised reform and a subtle instrument of control: less an overt colonial project than a standardized governance template that can channel donor priorities, institutional conditionalities, and expert authority into the heart of Syrian water and food policy. Whether IWRM becomes a neo‑colonial tool ultimately depends on how it is taken up: through shallow participation, external knowledge hierarchies and aid conditionality, or through reparative, feminist, and rights-based approaches that foreground sovereignty, justice, and plural knowledges instead. A genuinely de-colonial IWRM pathway for Syria would start from Syrian historical experience and political claims, not from global checklists, and would measure “integration” by its ability to redistribute power, repair damaged ecologies and secure dignified livelihoods, rather than simply by how well the country conforms to external models of best practice.