Integrated water resource management (IWRM) is a widely recognized management framework that is currently being adopted throughout post-Soviet Central Asia to inform and guide national water sector reforms, and to keep up with the pace of the faster moving land reforms taking place in the region. With hydrographic principles and public participation being at the core of this framework, the process in the region has started with the reform of on-farm irrigation systems by creating water users associations (WUAs), transferring irrigation management to them and introducing irrigation service fees. This paper draws on the experiences, over four years, of three study WUAs set up in the Ferghana Valley in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and the Kyrgyz Republic. Aiming to explore the differences in institutional environment and arrangements in these three countries for establishing WUAs, as well as assessing WUA performances (particularly from users' perspectives), the study reveals that it is not only the newly-established institutional arrangements in the irrigation sector but also their internal operations, coupled with other important factors such as size of area farmed, overall viability of agriculture and a wider economic context that crucially determine overall irrigation performance
The division of Central Asia into several independent states, and the transition from the centrally planned economy to a market economy in the majority of those states, affected all sectors and all social levels in the region. One such example is irrigation. Centrally planned and financed from Moscow, on-farm irrigation systems were managed by collective farms. The process of decentralization through the dismantling of collective farms led to a restructuring of services and infrastructure throughout Central Asia. Water users associations (WUAs) have been established to transfer on-farm irrigation management to farmers throughout the region, including Uzbekistan. Many women in Uzbekistan actively participate in farming activities, so their role in the on-farm irrigation restructuring process is important. Yet, the findings from this study suggest that participation of women is very limited in WUAs as Gender, Technology and Development 15(2) 201-222 Downloaded from 202 Tumur Gunchinmaa et al. Gender, Technology and Development, 15, 2 (2011): 201-222very few women are registered as land owners. Because of high levels of migration by men to other countries, farm activities are mostly carried out by women. Despite this, women's decision-making power within their farms is limited.
This book makes a valuable contribution in the investigation of the role of water in political, economic and social processes. It is based on rigorous and empirically grounded cross-national analyses. In particular, the book provides analyses of the relation of water scarcity and environmental security in countries termed by the editors as Central Eurasia, which includes countries of Central Asia, the Caucasus, Iraq and Mongolia. The book's main goal is to explore the relationship between water, environmental security and sustainable rural development in this region. It does this through five parts and 13 chapters. The first part provides an introduction through discussion of sustainable rural development as the conceptual backdrop for the book and gives an overview of each section of the volume.The second part gives an account of simultaneous changes of natural and social regimes of water distribution in Afghanistan, Iran and Mongolia, which have been undergoing extensive political and social changes, and Uzbekistan, where the decentralization of Soviet-era irrigation institutions is in progress. The discussions that are presented in this part of the book are important as they critically evaluate the design and implementation of the projects and reports by donors and the international community which fail to take account of the local conditions at the grassroots level. In addition, Vener and Campana (part 3) conclude that the overlap and contradiction of projects implemented by the international community is one of the main curbs on effective transboundary water allocation in the South Caucasus region.The chapter on Mongolia by Caroline Upton, in part 2, demonstrates the importance of carefully designing projects and policies in rural areas that relate to common resources such as water. The author highlights the relation between natural and social scarcity of water drawn from the case studies of herder communities at three locations in the Gobi region. Although natural water scarcity is thought as one of the main problems facing livestock husbandry in Mongolia, the study exposes the human-induced side of water scarcity. Moreover, the study brings out the gaps in project and policy design and implementation by the state and various donors such as World Bank and UNDP that try to mediate and regulate water scarcity through introducing community-based water resource management without consideration of long-established social norms of reciprocity, and without understanding the concept of 'ownership' in rural communities. The author concludes that "while community-based models should by no means be rejected, they must not be viewed as a panacea for the failings of neo-liberal or state-centred solutions to water scarcity" (p. 96). The findings presented in this chapter potentially have a significant implication on policy and project design in relation to water resource management in rural areas in Mongolia.The discourse analysis presented by Kai Wegerich in part 3, on inter-state cooperation in five Central Asian count...
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