In this talk Dr Muna Dajani looks at how a unified watershed governance was devised by external powers, mainly the British and Americans, to construct the water resources of the Jordan River Basin as a unified, apolitical and ‘natural’ watershed. In their attempt to depoliticise the boundaries of the watershed, these forces reinforced a particular worldview that considered natural resources as sites of extractivism and exploitation in the quest for modernity and nation state-building. This resulted in a highly politicised, securitised and dehistoricised conceptualisation of water and its governance. The talk draws on examinations of technical and hydrogeological water availability and use, while also paying attention to ever-changing relations between humans and their environment. It examines how engineers and government representatives engage with water as a resource and sheds light on how ethnographic inquiry into watersheds could challenge the rigidity and banality of scientific conceputalisations and understandings about water and its flows.