abstract: In the early 1960s, global actors and international organizations embraced desalination as a promising development tool and a fresh expression of technology's power to control nature. Amid postwar reconstruction, decolonization, and Cold War tensions, desalination symbolized progress and promised equitable, universally accessible fresh water. Yet, despite its compelling appeal, desalination was prohibitively expensive compared to existing sources of water, with numerous technical and economic uncertainties remaining unresolved. By looking at the cases of Tunisia and Chile, this article explores the techno-political mismatch between utopian visions of desalination solving water scarcity across any geography and the political, financial, and environmental realities of implementation. As a form of hope and aspiration, desalination demonstrates how high-modernist ideals materialized unevenly, shaped by diverse and contested global contexts. By tracing this transnational pursuit, the article foregrounds a significant yet relatively unknown global history of technological optimism and shows how universalist visions ran up against local geographies and postcolonial development agendas.
Elizabeth Hameeteman (Thu,) studied this question.