In Lebanon, the organization of the water legislation dates back to as far as antiquity. While customs and habits used to govern water in the past, codified laws and their associated legal infrastructure are present nowadays, and cohabitate with persisting unofficial law. Mesopotamian, Roman, Ottoman, and French water laws were superimposed on Muslim customs and practices and traditional Arab social water arrangements in Lebanon, throughout a long history of conquests or mandates. Traditional customs and practices of water use that evolved into lore are still prevailing today, and go hand in hand with a palimpsest of water laws. Through a review of the co-evolution of thousands of years of written and unwritten water-related texts, the unique features of a hydro-palimpsest that combines formal and informal systems are put into value in an effort to explore their future potential in the sound and efficient management of water, in light of rapid global changes affecting the resource.

Lebanon has not been able to properly develop and benefit from its water sources. A confessional system of governance has hindered development of the sector. Laws and regulations have been developed erratically with many superseding others without the superseded laws being erased from the registry. This created a chaotic regulatory and legal environment with overlapping jurisdictions and no clear accountability mechanisms. The period before the onset of the civil war in 1975 witnessed significant progress of both infrastructure and laws and regulations related to the management of the water sector. The civil war destroyed the water sector infrastructure and emptied all regulatory control of the resources. The period of reconstruction between 1990 and 1999 witnessed the promulgation of ambitious reconstruction plans for the water sector with funding reliant on borrowing from local and external debtors. Post 1999, government reforms started creeping into the system but were often donor driven and still suffered from the same mistakes of laws overlain on top of existing laws without erasing the older material. Critically, the management of the sector is not inclusive and the beneficiaries of water services are often not heard and ignored.

In lebanon, traditional customs and practices of water use evolved into lore still prevailing today. In south lebanon, rural communities adapted to the characteristic scarcity in water resources of the region by harvesting and storing rainwater in birket. These open-air reservoirs constitute one of the many ancestral water practices that are the most appropriate for adaptation to uncertain changes and future water management. Despite the potential for more frequent and severe droughts in the future, and current sporadic formal access to water, birket-s are actually declining in numbers. In this paper I ask: what can be done to strengthen traditional social water arrangements and how can we reclaim them to better face the current and future water management problems? I first examine the set of laws, written and unwritten, at play. Then I analyse two cases of reclaimed birket-s to better understand the social and economic aspects of their functions in the community. I argue that this forms a palimpsest of legislative and administrative water competence that is better able to address uncertainty and water insecurity.