Environmental Engineering Reference
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situation as well as informal institutions even gain importance due to the discontinuation of the
formal ones.
However, we also could argue that the breakdown of the Soviet Union and the radical
(formal) regime change have provided a critical juncture with the option for switching the path,
for fundamental institutional change. In the cases of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, both countries
have experienced a radical change: the breakdown of the Soviet Union, accompanied by inde
pendence and economic as well as political transformation. Old political institutions have been
(formally) abandoned and new institutions designed. As transformation affected the political,
societal, and economic system of the countries in general, it was also an external shock to the
water management as a centralized, state managed sector. Some formal organization and rules
of water management stopped functioning. There was a need to redefine organizational struc
tures and rules of water management. The disaster of the Aral Sea and the wider ecological
consequences of Soviet water management made obvious the need to change the norms and
values attached to water use. Both countries reacted with new water policies, new rules and
organizations, as well as with awareness raising measures addressing the cognitive layer of
water usage in order to address this challenge.
A third option would be that the outcome of reforms is neither a result of complete path
dependency nor complete institutional change, but a rather complex re arrangement of old and
new institutional elements that can be framed with the concept of institutional bricolage. As
water is a resource with multiple usages and identities, it affects different institutional logics,
such as that of religion, of community, of economy. Additionally, in the transformation phase
still existing Soviet as well as newly introduced post Soviet rules can be expected to be availa
ble. In the process of designing new water institutions, the bricoleurs can patch together ele
ments of different institutional logics available to them. It then depends on which and how
many options are available to determine whether more old or more new elements are chosen.
To understand institutional change, the politics of water institutional reform must be
scrutinized: How does neopatrimonialism exactly influence the political processes of policy
formulation and implementation? This point is related to the already mentioned research gap
existing on these political questions. Based on the assumption that policy outcomes are partly,
but not only, the result of the institutional context and are also influenced by actors' interests
and strategies, then politics can be expected to have an impact. The question of interest is for
whom beneficial elements persist; which actors can influence which elements of institutions
should persist and which should be replaced; and which other institutions in which way con
strain or create options of actors. To grasp these processes and interrelations, different analyti
cal perspectives are combined. These are presented in the next chapter.
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