Exploring Resilience and Transformability of a River Basin in the Face of Socioeconomic and Ecological Crisis: an Example from the Amudarya River Basin, Central Asia

Abstract

Water from the Amudarya River is a vital and strategic resource for semi-arid Uzbekistan because of its heavy reliance on irrigated agriculture. The Uzbek water management regime, however, has proven to be rather reluctant to adapt to changing environmental and socio-political conditions despite recent massive pressures caused by political, environmental, or donor-induced developments in the region. The aim of this paper is to explore reasons for the low adaptability of the Uzbek water sector and assess implications for the resilience of the Uzbek social-ecological system (SES). By analyzing past losses of resilience as well as first attempts at institutional change in land and water management, we identify drivers as well as structural factors and mechanisms that act as barriers for adaptation and transformation towards a more sustainable system. With the collapse of the Aral Sea fisheries and the basin-wide large scale soil salinization, the SES in the Amudarya River Basin has shifted to a new, less desirable regime. However, the high resilience of the social system is keeping it in its current undesirable state and further degrades its long-term resilience. Our analysis identifies reinforcing feedbacks caused by ecological dynamics, vested interests, and a patronage system that contribute to the resistance to change and keep the system locked in its current unsustainable state. These factors are rooted in the history of the SES in the river basin, such as the economic dependence on cotton and the state-centered management approach. The window of opportunity for significant changes of the larger scale institutional setting that might have been open after the breakup of the Soviet Union was or could not be used to achieve a transformation to more sustainable resources use. Measures aimed at an incremental improvement of the current situation are not sufficient to prevent further losses of resilience. Resilience and transformability of the larger scale SES (political, economic, and institutional settings) are needed to enable the smaller scales (regional and local water management) to adapt and change. However, we identified opportunities for change arising from the slow acceptance of bottom-up management institutions in the water sector and from the extensive restoration capacity of the ecosystems.

Continuity and Change in Social-ecological Systems: the Role of Institutional Resilience

“…This has been called the "Soviet syndrome", i.e., the conservation of an authoritarian political system Ecology and Society 17(2): 8 http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol17/iss2/art8/ despite formal implementation of a democratic constitution and rule of law (Tolipow 2009). Institutional change is gradual at best and often not fully implemented (Schlüter and Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2011). The economy, and especially export commodities such as cotton, are still tightly controlled by the state (ICG 2007).…”

“…The dismantling of the former state farms and collective farms began shortly after independence. Waves of restructuring and privatization occurred after 1998 (with the new Land Code and several laws on new forms of agricultural production) and 2005 (restructuring of agricultural production units) (Herrfahrdt 2004, Schlüter andHerrfahrdt-Pähle 2011). Nevertheless, the basic structures of the agricultural sector remained unchanged: land still belongs to the state, land ownership is possible only in the form of leasehold (Republic of Uzbekistan 1998), and the Soviet state order system (which secures state control over agricultural production and output) is still in place for the dominant crops (cotton and wheat).…”

“…The reforms in the water sector entered the second phase with the Decree on the Main Directions of Agricultural Reform (Republic of Uzbekistan 2003), which stipulates that water management be aligned with hydrological boundaries in order to increase the fit of the social and ecological system (Young 2002, Schlüter andHerrfahrdt-Pähle 2011). Similar to the introduction of WUAs, the implementation of hydrological boundaries was undertaken mainly due to the initiative of a high-ranking senior official within the Ministry (Yalcin and Mollinga 2006).…”

A participação das ciências sociais na produção de conhecimento sobre mudanças climáticas

“…al, 2010;OVERDEVEST, 2010;PONCET et. al, 2011;SCHULUETER;HERRFAHRDT-PAEHLE, 2011;SOMMERVILE et. al, 2010;VATN, 2010;YI;BAYLEY, 2010) Qual seria a razão da discrepância encontrada entre o que o que o ISSC chama de ciência social, e o que assim chamamos no Brasil?…”

Transitions between risk management regimes in cities

“…Here four archetypal risk management regimes are defined that reflect a set of intended and unintended practices: collapse, resistance, resilience, and transformation. We specify these terms and associated concepts from an extensive review of literature (Rotberg 2011 andDouglas et al 2015 on analyses of systems under conditions of collapse; Folke et al 2010, Schlüter and Herrfahrdt-Pähle 2011, Wilson et al 2013, Hordijk et al 2014 on resilience and the connective transformability; Brown et al 2013, Ferguson et al 2013, McApline et al 2015 on the concept of transformation and diagnosing transformative change; Binder et al 2013, Polechová and Barton 2015 on the use of different frameworks for analyzing social-ecological systems; Hodbod and Adger 2014 on how to connect resiliency to management system analysis).…”