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MENA is among the most water-challenged regions globally. While ‘outsiders” advising policy makers have become increasingly strident in their demands that the region adopt economic/market principles in managing water, policy makers in the region have been able to resist these suggestions. We take an interdisciplinary approach, arguing that the existence of a sanctioned discourse that defines water as a social, rather than an economic, resource contributes to this outcome. At the same time, policy makers have been able to avoid addressing water deficits, because of the availability of cheap virtual water, primarily in the form of grain imports.

Government secrecy is often portrayed as antithetical to transparency¹ as well as an affront to the general right to know, citizen participation, administrative oversight, and democracy itself.² Furthermore, government secrecy is connected to “much broader questions regarding the structure and performance of democratic systems” (Galnoor, 1977, p. 278), and in instances, is “more dangerous to democracy than the practices they conceal” (Fulbright, 1971).³ This condition has led to what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1987) describes as a secrecy state, whichhas extended the secrecy system far beyond its legitimate bounds. In doing so, the target is far less to prevent the disclosure of information to enemy governments than to prevent the disclosure of information to the American Congress, press and people. For governments have discovered that secrecy is a source of power and an efficient way of covering up the embarrassments, blunders, follies and crimes of the ruling regime. (p. 5)