Coping with transition: Insights from Kyrgyzstan

Abstract

The devastating effects of food crises and famine in Africa and Asia in the 1980s have stimulated a spate of research into the strategies that households adopt in order to survive.' This work has not only served to strengthen the theoretical claims of an entitlements approach to famine,2 but also provided important insights into the changing objectives of households, their diverse responses to food crises and the variable significance of apparently similar responses in pastoral and farming communities. It has proved particularly useful to policy makers in designing early warning systems and famine relief programmes. However, the application of this approach has been limited not only geographically to famine-struck countries in the South but also situationally to cases of acute food crisis. It is the purpose of this article to demonstrate the theoretical and practical usefulness of extending the application of such micro-level research both to post-communist transitional economies, which fit comfortably neither into the so-called developing nor developed worlds, and to situations of severe economic crisis, which are not yet characterised by acute food shortages or famine. We focus on the case of Kyrgyzstan, a former Central Asian Republic of the Soviet Union, which gained formal political independence in 1990. We begin by first defining some of our key terms. Throughout the article the term 'household' is used to refer to a unit of co-residence where individual members, who may or may not be kin, 'eat from the same pot'. While most of the research on household coping strategies in famine situations has treated the household as an undifferentiated, harmonious aggregate which is the lowest level of decision making, this article takes note of more recent work on the complexity of intra-household relations, which questions the underlying assumption that individual members subordinate their particular interests for the general good of the household and underlines the importance of relationships of power and subordination along age and gender lines.3 Interviewees were thus asked to relate how they and other residents of the household had responded to the economic crisis. Their accounts are interpreted as reflective of their own particular understanding of the situation and not as somehow representative of how the 'household' as a unified, conscious agent acts. The second conceptual point relates to the notion of 'strategy'. In her seminal piece on household coping strategies Corbett argues for using the term 'strategy' rather than 'mechanism' as 'it most readily implies the careful forward planning that has been observed'.4 I would argue that the term strategy and its implied