IWRM in Uzbekistan: A Global Concept with Local Consequences

Abstract

The chapter discusses research findings generated within the framework of the BMBF-funded project entitled “Economic and Ecological Restructuring of Land and Water Use in the Region Khorezm (Uzbekistan): A Pilot Project in Development Research” and implemented in 2001–2011. The authors look at the processes of how IWRM as a globalized concept for irrigation governance is locally operationalized and expressed in the implementation practices within specific conditions of contemporary Uzbekistan. The chapter begins with an overview of the processes which describe the variability of how IWRM principles have been incorporated in Uzbekistan at the level of official institutional policies. It then moves to a discussion of how these policies infiltrate into less formal work practices. We begin with an analysis of a “micro-level” water governance demonstrating important linkages between the officially endorsed IWRM agenda and historically and culturally-embedded systems of informal water management in Uzbekistan. Using an innovative method of inquiry and analysis called “institutional ethnography” (Smith 1987), we discover important points of disjuncture between the formal promises of IWRM-motivated policies and the actual outcomes of the pertinent policies for the marginalized water users. We attempt to explain this inconsistency and put forward an argument which elucidates how benevolent and well-intended policies under the IWRM framework become occluded by the organizational and political-economic administrative apparatus of state-led agricultural marketing in Uzbekistan. Our analysis offers an explicated account of IWRM as a practiced activity, opening up institutional issues that require informed and empirically-based reflection.