Governance & Regulation

Scarcity is hydrology; shortage is governance. Jordan has 61 cubic metres of renewable internal fresh water per person a year and about 97 cubic metres of water actually available, against an absolute scarcity threshold of 500, and the difference between rationed chaos and a functioning modern service at that level is institutional rather than hydrological.^1 2 3 Who sets the rules, who runs the pipes, and who pays for what.

The region pays for getting this wrong, and the World Bank has costed it. More than 70% of regional GDP is generated in areas of high to very high surface water stress, against a global average of about 22%. Expected losses from climate-related water scarcity are put at 6 to 14% of GDP by 2050, the highest of any region. Poor water quality alone costs 0.5 to 2.5% of GDP a year. And the region’s effective water subsidies are the highest in the world, with the fiscal burden of subsidised utilities estimated at 2% of regional GDP.⁴ Meeting these challenges, the Bank concludes, depends as much on better governance as on better endowments.⁴

The international benchmark is the OECD’s twelve Principles on Water Governance, presented as the twelve must-dos for designing effective, efficient and inclusive water policy, and endorsed by more than 170 governments and stakeholder groups.⁵ A well-documented illustration of what they describe comes from outside this region, and predates them. Phnom Penh’s water authority cut losses from 72% in 1993 to 6%, reached a 99.9% collection ratio and moved to full cost-recovery tariffs through staffing, billing improvements, metering, pipe replacement, leak repair and autonomy; losses were about 8.75% in 2023.^6 7

Three governance models span the region, and the taxonomy is ours rather than anyone else’s. Ministry-led systems in Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Morocco concentrate policy, investment and often operation in a water ministry with subordinate utilities. Corporatised-utility systems in most of the Gulf separate policy from delivery, with commercially run companies operating under regulators and procurement agencies. In fragmented systems such as Lebanon, Libya and Yemen the binding constraint is not the resource but divided or hollowed-out institutions.

Almost every country now runs a long-horizon strategy, and the credible ones pair targets with tariffs and metering. Jordan’s National Water Strategy 2023 to 2040 commits to cutting non-revenue water from 52% to 25% nationally and anchors supply on the National Conveyance Project, 300 million cubic metres of desalinated water from Aqaba needing 300 MW of generation to move it.^2 8 The strategy dated it to around mid-2028; in April 2026 the government expected it to begin operations in 2030,⁹ and financial close was still pending in September 2026.¹⁰ Saudi Arabia’s National Water Strategy 2030, adopted in 2018, sets reuse of treated wastewater from 17% to 70%, technical losses from 40% to 15%, per-capita consumption from 263 to no more than 150 litres a day, and non-renewable groundwater abstraction down from 20.6 billion cubic metres to between 5 and 9.¹¹

Whether rules bind: regulatory quality across the region

One case in this sector, examined in full.

Strategies set direction; statutes decide what anyone can be made to do. The instruments below are the ones that actually govern water in the region, with the numbers and dates they carry in the gazette or in FAO’s legal register.

Beside national law sits a layer of regional instruments under the League of Arab States, and none of them binds a state that has not chosen to follow it. The League’s own member-states page lists 22 states. Seventeen of the 20 countries on this site are among them: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, the UAE and Yemen. Iran, Israel and Türkiye are not on the list.³¹ Syria, suspended for more than a decade, was readmitted by the League’s foreign ministers on 7 May 2023.³²

The framework text is the Arab Strategy for Water Security in the Arab Region 2010–2030. The Arab Economic and Social Summit in Kuwait tasked the Arab Ministerial Water Council with producing it in January 2009. The Arab Centre for the Studies of Arid Zones and Dry Lands (ACSAD) drafted it, and at its second session in Cairo in July 2010 the Council approved the draft in principle, with written approvals requested from the concerned institutions in the Arab states by 10 December 2010.³³ Sources differ on when it counts as adopted. The English translation of its summary carries the legend “approved by Arab Ministerial Water Council (AMWC) Cairo, 2012”, while an ESCWA paper dates the approval to 2011.^33 34 This site therefore speaks of a 2010 to 2012 adoption process.

The strategy sets one main objective, Arab water security, and 16 specific objectives, grouped under three domains: economic and developmental (water services, financing, technology, integrated management, non-conventional water), political (Arab water rights in occupied territories or in waters shared with regional neighbours, and cooperation among Arab states on shared resources), and institutional development (capacity, awareness, research, participation).³³ Its yardstick is a set of performance indicators under six expected outcomes. They are qualitative, such as “Increased number of agreements on all types of shared water in the Arab Region”. The one figure the text calls a “reasonable and achievable target” is irrigation efficiency of 80%, against an average it puts at 40 to 50%.³³ The horizon is twenty years, 2010 to 2030, “with adopted indicators evaluated every five years”, and the strategy calls itself “not compulsory, but rather a guide to joint Arab action”. Implementation falls to national ministries and to the Council’s technical secretariat, which the text identifies as the General Directorate for Economic Affairs of the Arab League.³³ This site did not find a published five-year review.

The Arab Ministerial Water Council is the ministerial body behind the strategy: the League lists “Ministers of Water” among its ministerial councils.³¹ Its first session met in Algiers on 27 and 28 June 2009.³⁴ Two later sessions are documented here. The 11th, on 27 June 2019 at the League’s headquarters in Cairo, had on its agenda, according to Qatar’s foreign ministry, the implementation of the executive strategic plan for water security.³⁵ The 16th, at the Dead Sea in Jordan on 27 November 2024, adopted a resolution inviting Arab states and the Council’s technical secretariat to cooperate with ESCWA on regional preparations for the 2026 United Nations Water Conference.³⁶ The 17th session is scheduled for Cairo on 26 October 2026, in the programme of the ninth Cairo Water Week (25 to 29 October), with technical meetings listed for 24 and 25 October. No outcome is known at the time of writing.^37 38

The Council’s attempt at a binding text on shared waters shows how far the framework reaches. In 2010 it invited the Center for Water Studies and Arab Water Security and ESCWA to prepare a draft legal framework. A first draft was reviewed at an intergovernmental meeting in May 2011, which concluded with a draft in the form of a binding convention. Revised versions went through seven intergovernmental consultative meetings between 2011 and 2016, the last on 15 and 16 March 2016 in Cairo. The scope swung between shared groundwater only (decided in 2011) and surface water and groundwater (2012).³⁴ On 26 October 2016 the Council’s eighth session recommended postponing any decision on the draft convention until conditions for its success were assured, and convening a meeting on common guiding principles instead. The ESCWA paper reads this as revealing “the difficulty in reaching consensus among Arab States”; its summary dates the resolutions calling for the reformulation to 2017. The principles would be “non-binding rules” that countries “can choose to follow them or not”, and a draft in Arabic, written by ESCWA, was presented at an intergovernmental meeting organised by ESCWA and the League on 30 November 2017.³⁴ Whether the principles were later adopted is not established in the sources this site opened. The convention’s treatment of shared waters with non-Arab states and of occupied territories is covered in the conflict and diplomacy hub.

ESCWA, the UN regional commission, works around this framework rather than inside it. Its water page says it supports the Council’s efforts to implement the strategy and advises the Council of Arab Ministers Responsible for the Environment, the Gulf Cooperation Council and member states, among others.³⁹ It hosts the secretariat of the Arab Integrated Water Resources Management Network (AWARENET), launched in 2002 as an independent network of training and research institutes, NGOs, government institutions and experts.^40 41 And RICCAR, an initiative of the United Nations and the League of Arab States, was set up to respond to a request from the Arab Ministerial Water Council and the Council of Arab Ministers Responsible for the Environment for an assessment of climate-change impacts on freshwater resources and the resulting socio-economic vulnerability.⁴²

Two events with similar names are easily confused. The Arab Water Conference has been scheduled alongside the Council’s sessions: the sixth ran at the Dead Sea on 27 and 28 November 2024,³⁶ and the seventh is set for 26 and 27 October 2026 on the sidelines of Cairo Water Week, with Arabic as its official language.⁴³ The Arab Water Forum is a separate series. The Arab Water Council announced it as a tri-annual event, and its fourth edition ran in Cairo from 26 to 28 November 2017.⁴⁴ The seventh Forum took place during Saudi Water Week in Jeddah, 28 June to 2 July 2026.⁴⁵ On 29 June the Saudi ministry reported that Arab water ministers had agreed to develop a joint roadmap on regional cooperation, at a session that brought together water ministers and representatives from 11 Arab countries. This site has not seen a roadmap text.⁴⁶

Dated milestones from the documents above:

• January 2009. The Arab Economic and Social Summit in Kuwait tasks the Council with a water security strategy.³³
• 27–28 June 2009. First session of the Council, Algiers.³⁴
• 1–3 July 2010. Second session, Cairo. The draft strategy is approved in principle, and a resolution invites ESCWA and the Center for Water Studies and Arab Water Security to draft a shared-waters legal framework.^33 34
• 15–16 June 2011. Third session, Cairo. The legal framework is limited to shared groundwater.³⁴
• 29 May 2012. Fourth session, Baghdad. The scope returns to surface water and groundwater.³⁴
• 15–16 March 2016. Seventh intergovernmental consultative meeting, Cairo, on the last draft of the convention.³⁴
• 26 October 2016. Eighth session, Cairo. A decision on the convention is postponed in favour of guiding principles.³⁴
• 30 November 2017. Draft guidance principles presented to an intergovernmental meeting.³⁴
• 27 June 2019. 11th session, League headquarters, Cairo.³⁵
• 27 November 2024. 16th session, Dead Sea, Jordan.³⁶
• 26 October 2026. 17th session scheduled, Cairo.³⁸

What separates the leaders from the laggards is rarely the strategy document. It is four capabilities, and each one fails in a recognisable way.

Measurement: you cannot govern unmetered water

Metered abstraction and audited utility accounts come before everything else, because a target you cannot measure is an aspiration. Saudi Arabia’s strategy is explicit about it, targeting 100% of wells licensed and of agricultural wells metered by 2030.¹¹ Jordan established a Utilities Performance Monitoring Unit to monitor the performance of its three public water service companies.²

Morocco is the cautionary record. By the end of 2023 about 794,000 hectares were equipped with localised irrigation systems,⁴⁷ while groundwater monitoring under the flagship project amounted to meters for 20 farmers in Haouz and eight in Tadla, and on 5 June 2026 the successor project’s indicator for metered wells in Chtouka still stood at zero against a target of 4,000 by December 2027.^48 49 The record is traced document by document in our case study on drip conversion. The state auditor, separately, found more than 102,264 abstractors operating outside the authorisation regime altogether, and irrigation demand that did not stabilise.^50 47

Tariff credibility: prices that fund operations without punishing the poorest

A tariff has to cover operations while protecting lifeline consumption. Across the Middle East and North Africa, service fees recover about 35% of the cost of producing conventional water and about 10% of the cost of desalinated water, and some cities charge seven to eight times less than cities elsewhere in the region and the world. The region spends 2% of GDP on public water subsidies.⁴

Jordan is the clearest reforming case. Its first household block was JOD 0.218 a cubic metre in 2024, rising across seven monthly blocks to an unsubsidised top block, as on our tariff benchmarks. The cost to the state fell from JOD 2.16 in 2021 to JOD 1.93 in 2024, which lifted the household share of real cost from just over a third to nearly 60%, and municipal tariffs are rising 4.6% a year until the conveyance project starts.⁵¹ At the other end, Kuwait charges citizens 800 fils per thousand imperial gallons against a production cost of about KD 5 rising to KD 8, which peer-reviewed work puts at a subsidy of roughly 92% that has barely moved in a decade.^52 53

What water costs, and what it is sold for

Published household tariffs beside the published cost of supply, where one exists. Where both describe the same supply, the gap between them is a measure of the subsidy; for most countries no published cost of supply was found.

Regulatory separation: independent of the operator, in practice and not only on paper

Procurement agencies and regulators are supposed to sit apart from the bodies they oversee. Oman has built that separation in steps, all of them traceable: a regulator created for electricity and related water in 2004, renamed the Authority for Public Services Regulation in 2020, service delivery corporatised into a national wastewater company by decree later the same year, and a dedicated water and wastewater sector law in 2023.^{23 24 25 26} Palestine’s 2014 decree law took the same route on paper, creating a regulatory council independent of the water authority.¹⁵

Saudi Arabia is the instructive counter-example, and it is documented rather than alleged. Cabinet Resolution 652 of 21 June 2022 ordered the state’s production, transport and storage assets to be transferred to a company owned by the Public Investment Fund; as of October 2025 the transfer had not taken effect and the production arm still operated most of those facilities.²⁹ The Saudi Water Authority, created from the Saline Water Conversion Corporation under Cabinet Resolution 918 of 7 May 2024, is the main water regulator, and its production arm employed around 5,000 people.^27 28 29 Counsel to investors warns about bodies performing overlapping regulatory and operational functions.²⁹

Enforcement: the part that is politically expensive

Illegal wells and connections are a governance problem rather than a policing one, and they are where reform programmes usually stop. More than 20,000 illegal groundwater wells have been dug in the Greater Beirut and Mount Lebanon area alone.⁵⁴

The Jordanian record shows what disciplined network work buys, and what it costs. A comprehensive programme in one Amman zone cut non-revenue water from 46% to 11% for about US$7 million; a simpler approach across several zones took losses from about 43% to 26% at roughly US$3 million a zone; replacing 7,000 customer meters in Aqaba cut losses from 56% to 22%.⁵⁵ Nationally, about 50% of municipal water is still lost, against an acceptable rate of around 20%.⁸

The regional reform wave runs in one direction: corporatise the utility, professionalise procurement, meter everything, and bring private capital in through contracts rather than asset sales. Saudi Arabia’s suspension in July 2021 of the sale of a 60% stake in the Ras Al Khair plant, after seven companies and consortia had been invited to bid, is the clearest sign of where that line now sits. The facility had cost more than US$7 billion to build and the sale was expected to raise about US$2 billion; Smart Water Magazine put the plant’s value at up to US$3.5 billion.^56 57

Most water decisions in the region, whether an abstraction licence, a tariff, a tender or an environmental permit, pass through bodies like those listed below. A common pattern recurs. Typically a lead ministry owns policy and the resource, a regulator sits beside it where one exists, and one or more utilities deliver the service. Oman’s Authority for Public Services Regulation, renamed in 2020 from the regulator set up in 2004, and Palestine’s Water Sector Regulatory Council, created by Decree Law 14 of 2014, are separate economic regulators in law.^23 24 15 Saudi Arabia shows the other pattern: the Saudi Water Authority regulates the sector and, as of October 2025, its production arm still operated most facilities formerly held by the Saline Water Conversion Corporation; the ownership transfer ordered in 2022 had not taken effect.^27 29 In August 2026 management and supervision of more than 400 inland groundwater and surface-water desalination plants passed to Water Solutions Company (Al Holol), the company named in the 2022 resolution, while the authority’s staff kept carrying out operation and maintenance.^58 59

Jordan (strategy under pressure), Saudi Arabia (restructuring still under way), Oman (a step-by-step separation of roles), Egypt (governance at scale), Morocco (drought-driven reform), Lebanon (what institutional failure costs).

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Ministry of Environment, Water & Agriculture (MEWA)Ministry · Saudi Arabia
• Saudi Water Authority (SWA)Regulator · Saudi Arabia
• Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI)Ministry · Jordan
• Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR)Ministry · Iraq
• Arab Water CouncilRegional body · Regional
• Arab Countries Water Utilities Association (ACWUA)Regional body · Regional
• UN-ESCWARegional body · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Three reform frontiers are worth watching. Tariffs, because every serious strategy implies them and because the regional starting point is 35% cost recovery on conventional water and 10% on desalinated.⁴ Groundwater licensing, the hardest enforcement problem in the region. And utility creditworthiness, the gateway to financing the next decade without sovereign guarantees: Jordan is explicitly aiming at 100% operating cost recovery by 2030 to hold sector debt to US$11 billion in 2040 rather than more than US$20 billion.⁸

One quiet indicator is whether women appear in the institutions at all. In Jordan women are 11% of water-sector employees and 17.5% of leadership and supervision posts.⁸

Standing references for this sector.

• OECD, Principles on Water Governance (2015). Twelve principles for designing and implementing water governance. oecd.org
• World Bank, Beyond Scarcity: Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa (2017). The report frames the region’s water challenge as one of governance as well as scarcity. worldbank.org
• Pinsent Masons, guide to the regulatory framework for Saudi Arabia’s water sector (31 October 2025). A worked example of separating policy, regulation and production, and of how far that separation has actually gone. pinsentmasons.com
• UN-ESCWA and BGR, Inventory of Shared Water Resources in Western Asia (2013). The regional reference on shared rivers and aquifers, chapter by chapter. waterinventory.org