Abstract
This ethnographic research, conducted in 2015, aimed at understanding how farmers in the Beqaa plain in Lebanon constructed their tenure of irrigation water in relation to land tenure, and what were the modalities of their appropriation of water and their use of it, as a function of the origin of the water (source, river or well) and of the ways it was distributed (gravity, pumps, or drip). The field research has been conducted in Qubb Elias, where the two sources of Qubb Elias and Kheyrazat flow, and in the village of Anjar, in the central Beqaa, in a comparative perspective in eight other locations across the world. We were inspired by the theory of critical political ecology which casts light on the way social and political factors structure the agents' understanding of their relationship with natural resources and of the options that are offered to them. Beyond the now classical statement that economic and geostrategic factors are responsible for leading farmers into changing the ways they access water and land, we have identified four typical cases which illustrate how economic, social and geographical factors interact to produce various modalities of dealing with technical means (pumps, wells or flood or drip irrigation).