Jan Selby draws on numerous sources, from testimonies of local water engineers and administrators, to narrative accounts of citizens, and eyewitness accounts of people's coping strategies to examine the water crisis in the Middle East. He argues that the water crisis needs to be approached from a range of scales and perspectives -from the long historical patterns of state formation and development within which water crises emerge, to the practices through which people adapt to water shortages in the course of their everyday interaction-and frames the problems in relation to broader patterns of politics, political economy, state formation and development.