Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
quently, many international projects focused on interstate water relations. By way of capacity
building programs, seminars, the development of regional strategies, and conferences donors
tried to stimulate cooperation and the building of trust between the states. In Kyrgyzstan
alone, the World Bank, the European Union, the UN, the Swiss Agency for Development, the
German Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the Soros Foundation, and many others have not sel
dom redundant projects to develop a water strategy for Central Asia.
These projects are very inclusive in that they try to build lines of cooperation in Central
Asia. Numerous Kyrgyz scientists and professionals take part in these programs. Experts in
ministries as well as those at academic institutions and NGOs are constantly invited to attend
seminars, to participate in projects, or to make contributions for topics or conferences. All the
main actors from different state agencies, donor projects and academic institutions know each
other from numerous (donor initiated) conferences and projects (Koshmatov 2003: 11). Those
not involved in these projects or not invited are hence excluded from discussions. Therefore,
for actors in the field of water policy, there are a number of incentives to focus on internation
al water relations to finance salaries and technical equipment, attend conferences in Central
Asia and abroad, and gain prestige. The consequence is that the problems of international
water relations are much more present than those of national water policy.
This tendency is reinforced by the fact that, while building up an inclusive discourse on
regional water management, donors at the same time exclude national experts from problem
definition and solution finding efforts in domestic water policy. As already mentioned, all
current reforms are initiated by donors. The donor projects often work with foreign consul
tants and cooperate with national institutions only when it comes to project implementation
but not for problem definition and project development. Therefore, experts at national agen
cies have no incentives to focus their capacities on national water management problems.
We can sum up the impact of the institutions of decision making on WIR as follows: On
the one hand, there are numerous actors who participate in the decision making process. On
the other hand, as it is still presidentially dominated, these actors scarcely have the possibility
for agenda setting and making final decisions. They are restricted to the role of veto players or
to symbolic politics. This has fatal effects: the administrative fragmentation leads to many
interests and possible veto players. Especially those reforms that are perceived as a threat to
the status quo are therefore blocked. The role of donors interferes with these conditions as
they (1) are involved as actors in the decision making process; and (2) set with their project
rules their own parameters toward which national actors orient themselves and which thereby
influence the discourse.
6.4.2
The Impact of the Institutional Conditions of the Agricultural Sector on WIR
The close interrelatedness of land and water reform is obvious. The dissolution of the FSK
made it necessary to reorganize irrigation management, individual land rights made the need
for water rights obvious, and so on. While privatization was clearly a factor that pushed for
WIR, the interaction between both sectors is far more complex. Beyond the practical need for
cooperation, the aim of this analysis is to reveal how the general institutional setting of the
agricultural sector enables or hinders water institutional reform. As explained in chapter 5.5.3,
despite radical privatization, the agricultural sector is still characterized by a general a lack of
market conditions, widespread subsistence agriculture, bartering, and persisting patronage
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