Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
CSOs that receive financial assistance, technical equipment, and professional trainings from
donors:
“Being comparatively well funded, they [CSOs] daily remind the governments of their own lack of resources,
incompetence, ineffectiveness, and overall fragility, but without providing those same governments and the
bureaucrats who comprise them with the means of improving the situation from within” (Starr 2006: 15).
In both cases, donors do not address the water administration as much as they do address the
policy and law dimensions. Within the water administration, the meso level is especially critical:
the level of provincial and district bureaucrats who must implement reforms or circulate in
formation. This “messy middle” (Mehta et al. 1999: 16) is the place where formal and informal
structures meet, where the weaknesses of the administration are more visible and more effec
tive than on the higher levels. It is the provincial prosecutor who does not know how to apply
a law. It is the director of the local administration who does not accept the WUA as an inde
pendent organization. This level is critical for every policy reform. Yet, it is not sufficiently
addressed in the reform processes.
To summarize: Incoherencies between the different water institutional dimensions are in
both countries especially frapping between the water administration on the one hand and law
and policy on the other hand. The former actively resists reforms that threaten its status quo
and hinders decision making or implementation (especially in Kyrgyzstan); it sometimes also
unintentionally does not implement reforms due to lack of information and training in new
processes, roles, etc. (especially in Tajikistan). This ultimately results in a lack of ownership of
the reform processes and instead a reliance on donors for implementation. The limited activity
of the administration to implement reforms and to reform itself, is even if indirectly sup
ported by the activities of donors that partly overtake its tasks.
Donor Policies
In the previous discussion on the effects of neopatrimonialism on WIR, donors as actors and
rule setters were identified as an interfering variable to neopatrimonialism as they mitigate or
aggravate certain aspects. Donors play a considerable role in the politics in both countries, in
policy formulation as well as in implementation. As this was already shown in the preceding
sections, this part only shortly summarizes the general parameters of donors' engagement in
both countries.
Both countries experienced different donor strategies and, consequently, also different in
centives set and demands articulated by donors. In both countries, the conditions for donor
involvement are grounded in the political institutional setting. The mode of political transfor
mation in Kyrgyzstan shaped the path for donor involvement and an academic and political
discourse on water that is mainly concerned with interstate instead of national water manage
ment, while in Tajikistan a technocratic problem perception persists that focuses on finance
and rehabilitation problems. In Kyrgyzstan, the liberal regime invited donor involvement
putting emphasis on fostering the capacities of societal actors to articulate and participate in
the political process. More local water experts are involved in projects on regional water man
agement than on national water reforms. In Tajikistan, humanitarian assistance prevailed and
access to donor funds was mainly possible through technical proposals for projects like the
rehabilitation of destroyed infrastructure etc. Consequently, for Tajik water experts the suitable
strategy was not to publish a paper on the status of water in general, but to write a concrete
project appraisal for the renovation of an irrigation channel in a village. To give an example:
Two Tajik research institutes set up a NGO with all employees as members, in order to get
access to donor projects on infrastructure rehabilitation. Because many academics emigrated
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