The Socio-Technical Aspects of Water Management: Emerging Trends at Grass Roots Level in Uzbekistan

Iskandar Abdullaev,Peter P Mollinga

doi:10.3390/w2010085

Abstract

In Soviet times, water management was presented generally as a technical issue to be taken care of by the state water bureaucracy. Due to structural changes in agriculture in the two decades post-independence, irrigation water management has become an explicitly political and social issue in Central Asia. With the state still heavily present in the regulation of agricultural production, the situation in Uzbekistan differs from other post-communist states. Water management strategies are still strongly ‘Soviet’ in approach, regarded by state actors as purely ‘technical’, because other dimensions – economic, social and political – are ‘fixed’ through strong state regulation. However, new mechanisms are appearing in this authoritarian and technocratic framework. The application of a framework for socio-technical analysis in some selected Water Users’ Associations (WUAs) in northwest Uzbekistan’s Khorezm region shows that the WUAs are becoming arenas of interaction for different interest groups involved in water management. The socio-technical analysis of Khorezm’s water management highlights growing social differences at grass root level in the study of WUAs. The process of social differentiation is in its early phases, but is still able to express itself fully due to the strict state control of agriculture and social life in general.

Highlights

This paper presents a framework for the socio-technical1 analysis of water management and the results of its application in a Water Users’ Association (WUA) in the Khorezm region, Uzbekistan
The socio-technical framework has allowed us to show that actual water management in an irrigated region in northwest Uzbekistan is different from the dominant presentation of it as a structured, hierarchical and fully state-controlled process
1990s, limited as it may be in some respects, has generated the emergence of new, formal and informal arrangements in irrigation water management

Summary

Introduction

Solutions for NRM problems require an understanding of both natural resources systems and their interactions with human (management) systems [1]. “Normal professionalism” is a standard, disciplinary, limited response to problems, which is reproduced in the education system. This has contributed to the reproduction and continuation of problems, and has been generating limited approaches for addressing water management. A more comprehensive, inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to water management (1) acknowledges the complexity and heterogeneity of problems and organizations, (2) accepts the relevance of the local context and uncertainty, (3) implies interactive action and is intersubjective, and (4) has to make linkages across disciplinary boundaries [1]

Objectives

Findings

Discussion

Conclusion