Abstract
Our article reflects on the Kyrgyz experience of a transformation in pasture use and management, seeking to contribute to the literature on institutional change in post-socialist contexts. We employ the distributional theory of institutional change in order to understand gradual, informal de facto institutional change which emerged because of changes in formal institutions (laws) that changed the bargaining positions of actors involved. The study findings demonstrate the dynamics of change of interrelated formal institutions, power resources, informal institutions, and their distributional consequences. We observe that the enforcement of new pasture legislation introduced in 2009 gradually reducing bargaining asymmetry among actors, in the long run potentially favouring less powerful pasture users, who are herders providing herding services to their community. Evaluating the potential implications of formal institutional change for day-to-day pasture management and informal institutions, we expect changes to contribute to maintenance of pasture health in the medium to long term. However, traditionally powerful actors (individual herders) typically try to resist these changes and the shift to new informal institutions is therefore still highly contested.
Highlights
Since the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan has undergone a change from a centralized state-managed economy to a decentralized market-oriented economy
Shift of power may not immediately take effect and lead to institutional change; former informal rules may persist and co-exist with newly emerging alternative informal rules. This is related to either collective action problems of institutional change or difficulties and inertia in altering actors’ expectations (Knight 1992: 146–147), and resistance of disfavoured actors. This is what we observed in our study of institutional change in pastoralism in Kyrgyzstan
We focus on representative examples from both empirical cases, before and after the reform of 2009 to explain the informal institutional change that we observed – as a change of the equilibrium outcomes of negotiations between individual and community herders
Summary
Since the early 1990s, Kyrgyzstan has undergone a change from a centralized state-managed economy to a decentralized market-oriented economy. According to Knight (1992: 183) these factors are the main conditions producing incentives for both the intentional and spontaneous change of informal rules We use this theory to understand change in informal pastoral institutions and their implications for pasture management in the initial post-Soviet period, and to analyse the effects that more recent, formal institutional change as a result of policy changes in 2009 will have on informal institutions, pastoral mobility and sustainability of resource use. The bargaining situation is of core importance in developing our stylized understanding of reasons and mechanisms of institutional change and addressing the question of how power asymmetries in pasture use have changed as a result of new formal regulations implemented throughout the latest reform of pasture management in 2009. We use this understanding of the effects of formal institutional change on the process of informal institutional change and sustainability of pastures to extrapolate the effects of the 2009 reform in the medium to long-term
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