| By: |
Amirova, Iroda;
Petrick, Martin;
Djanibekov, Nodir |
| Abstract: |
In Central Asia, community water governance institutions emerged and prevailed
for a long time. By employing an analytical modelling approach using variants
of the evolutionary Hawk-Dove game, we scrutinise three epochs' (pre-Tsarist,
Tsarist and Soviet) coordination mechanisms and qualitatively compare them in
the efficiency spectrum. We find that the pre-Tsarist community water
governance setting, due to its synergetic and pluralistic aspects, was
associated with higher efficiency than the Tsarist and Soviet periods'
settings. The pre-Tsarist community arrangement linked irrigation duties with
benefits. Our analytical model reveals how the Tsarist Russian regulation that
replaced the election-sanctioning element with a de-facto system appointing
the irrigation staff and paying them fixed wages corrupted the
well-established pre-Tsarist decentralised water governance. We term this move
the "Kaufman drift". Resulting inadequacies in the water governance could have
been averted either by restoring the community mechanism's
election-sanctioning attribute or else with an alternative approach such as
privatising water resources. With the use of the "Krivoshein game," we produce
an alternative scenario for the region where we envisage the potential
consequences of the water privatisation. Modelling history might not
disentangle the complex nature of water governance evolution fully, however,
the heuristics we use in the analysis assist in guiding the diagnosis of the
matter and its solution. This makes our study well-timed for contemporary
Central Asia. The analyses assess current water management's chances to return
to ancient principles of election-sanctioning and perspectives of private
irrigation water rights. |
| Keywords: |
Central-Asian water,self-governance,hierarchy,markets,evolution |
| Date: |
2022 |
| URL: |
http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iamodp:200&r= |