Changing Palestine–Israel Ecologies: Narratives of Water, Land, Conflict, and Political Economy, Then and Now, and Life to Come

Three forms of narrative heuristics are identified and explored in the search for political inclusiveness, robustness, and legitimacy: (1) environmental topics: toxics and the need for second-order or reflexive institutions of modernization; water and the need for getting beyond zero-sum games; urban public goods and infrastructures; medical services and distributed care; animals and biodiversity and the need to pay attention to feedback that signals our inability to achieve perfect control and hence dependence on one another; (2) perspectival topoi: single-eyed stories of identity, ownership, interest, and mastery; double-voiced stories of mutual recognition, sub-versions, and alternative realities; and triangulated stories of polyvocal, interactive, risk-taking experimentalism; (3) processual narratives of structural transformation: political economies (agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial), second-order modernization and biopolitical forms of governance from societies of discipline to societies of control or regulation (by codes, flows, distributed feedback, desubjugated knowledges, and capillaries of micropower); ecological feedback systems ; and new grammars of multitude or modes of enhanced self-organized civil society coordination that can either work around governments and bureaucracies or can create public spheres from which to address and pressure government.¹