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There is wide consensus among scholars and practitioners that improved irrigation technologies increase farm productivity and improve resource use efficiency. However, there is also growing empirical evidence that efficiency improvements in irrigation water use may create rebound effects, i.e., they may trigger changes in farmers’ behavior that partly or fully offset the technical water savings expected under ceteris paribus conditions. In extreme cases, total water consumption may even increase. We studied the impacts of introducing water-saving irrigation technologies in Uzbekistan and used structured stakeholder interviews for an expert-based assessment of potential rebound effects. Our findings contribute to the understanding of impacts of technological and institutional responses to environmental and economic pressures in sustaining water resources. The study demonstrates that although the objective of increasing irrigation efficiency may be achieved, the actual water savings under Uzbek conditions are likely to be reduced due to rebound effects. Unless there are effective policy interventions, we expect rebound effects through an increase in water supply for crops that compensates for current shortages of irrigation water availability, an increase in irrigated area, a switch to more water-intensive crops, and overall economic growth. The findings of this paper provide a reference point for estimating the water-saving potential and for evaluating and adapting policies.

Worldwide, groundwater is often poorly understood and misgoverned due to difficulties in monitoring and collective action organisation. Problems occur due to groundwater’s invisible nature, consequent poor groundwater understanding, and systemic institutional failures. In Central Asia, groundwater coordination is important at local as well as national levels, considering regional water competition since state transitions. Historic water overuse further emphasises a need for groundwater coordination between states. Information on aquifer status is often publicly unavailable and rarely shared, even between national governmental agencies. Considering the region’s arid climate and dependence on glacial melt for seasonal flows, protection of groundwater is vital to ensure water access amid pressures such as climate change. Groundwater has historically provided drinking water, with recent increased use as an alternative water source for the agriculture sector. Institutional failures in groundwater governance can be understood as “soft limits” to adaptation in the region, which governance capacity improvements could ameliorate. To understand the current status of Central Asian groundwater governance through an illustrative case of Uzbekistan, we consider its social-ecological system, associated problems (e.g., pollution, and overexploitation), and institutional context. This paper summarises findings specific to Uzbekistan from a systematic literature review on the subject in Central Asia, outlining governance challenges and opportunities. Informational governance is analysed and reveals a clear impact on groundwater use and outcomes. They include: i) uncertainty over status (i.e., quantity and quality); ii) governance complexities at various levels due to multiple knowledges; iii) power constellations and a lack of cooperation suggest increased uncertainty; iv) interest in information reform. Public data access and coordination across the region should better support collective action at local levels, reduce governance complexities, and reduce status quo hierarchies.

Central Asian countries have experienced a transition from a centralized state-managed economy to a decentralized market-oriented one, and gained valuable experience in designing institutions involving common-pool resource (CPR) management. Top-down policy interventions have affected natural resource usage practices and had environmental, social and economic consequences. On the other hand, in a bottom-up transformation process, many informal practices for using local resources and many forms of cooperation have emerged and become institutionalized, adapting to the changing socio-economic context. This paper demonstrates an empirical application of the Institutions of Sustainability (IoS) framework, analyzing these emerged institutions, and governance structures in pasture and irrigation management. It studies how the physical nature-related transactions are institutionalized through the operationalization of a discriminative alignment principle. The research results show that actors’ interdependencies caused by the attributes of nature-related transactions play a decisive role in institutional development in CPR management in Central Asia. The authors argue that differences in the properties of physical nature-related transactions in pasture and irrigation water use can be linked and explained through differences in the key characteristics of governance structures.

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.

This article combines Aoki’s institutional complementarity concept with actor-centered institutional analysis of action situations to study herder behavior and institutional change in a complex pastoral social–ecological system. Transformation of the Mongolian Steppe Ecosystem in the face of climate and social change has led to a decline in pastoral mobility, which in turn is making the ecosystem less sustainable. Responding to this concern, Mongolian policymakers have designed pasture use and conservation policies. We evaluate whether the enacted policies are complementary to herders’ strategic choices. First, we reconstruct institutional choices herders make in the commons domain, where herders interact to use common pastures. Second, we track this process in the political economy domain, where pasture users support or resist government policies. Finally, we evaluate the complementarity of the strategic choices and resulting institutions in the interdependent action situations of both domains. In combination with game-theoretic model building, we have employed the process tracing method during field research in Mongolia. We have not identified any evident, stable institutional complementarity between high pastoral mobility and support for a policy of leasing and certification of land for winter and spring camps. Conversely, our findings do suggest that policies for establishing pasture user groups and pasture use planning can be effective. A critical mass of herders choosing to comply with these policies and engage in pastoral mobility will be crucial for sustaining the ecosystem. This will strengthen conditions for institutional complementarity and create a new institutional arrangement overall.

A fundamental problem in governing natural resources is how to design institutions, particularly property rights regimes, that support sustainable use and management of common property resources. Privatization of natural resources was a widespread solution to the “tragedy of the commons” during the 1980s and 1990s. But many such efforts failed to achieve sustainable use of resources, and policymakers are now experimenting with new types of policy interventions. We examine recent changes in pastoral institutions and their outcomes regarding resource-use rights and the sustainability of resource use in China and Kyrgyzstan. Interpreting changing property rights as a process of social construction, we examine altered rules and rights relations and the ensuing changes in legal correlates between various actors in selected choice settings. The article contributes to the literature regarding the impacts of such reforms on property rights and their development in pastoral contexts.

We review historical and contemporary literature on change in water-management institutions in post-socialist Uzbekistan, exploring the dynamics of change of formal institutions in irrigation-water management there by analyzing relationships between the perceptions and beliefs of policymakers, policy interventions they undertake, and the consequences that these seem to have on resource-use practices. We have mainly relied on the reviewed literature, but have also made use of expert interviews conducted by the authors during 2011–2016 in Uzbekistan. Our results indicate that Uzbek policymakers have learned much from the unanticipated and undesired consequences of earlier irrigation reforms, as their perceptions and beliefs have changed and developed over time. Yet, although policymakers’ beliefs have been fostered by a newly emergent Integrated Water Resources Management approach – which has become a central, globally promoted paradigm – the beliefs and institutions inherited from the Soviet era, as well as informal practices in irrigation-water use, have also been acting to constrain the choices of politicians and economic entrepreneurs.

The paper investigates actions and decisions of agricultural resource users and explores their implications for institutional change and natural resource management in the post-socialist context of Central Asia. More specifically, the authors propose a novel methodological approach for the aforementioned context to support policy-relevant research that explicitly addresses behavioral responses of pastoralists in Kyrgyzstan. The paper builds on distributive and economic theories of institutional change and combines findings from lab and field framed economic experiments with complementary qualitative methods (questionnaires, group discussions and semi-structured interviews). By these means the authors test the impact of a specific variable on institutional change in pasture use: the role of power and specifically the difference in the ability of players to “survive” in a bargaining game without an agreement. The impact of power asymmetries and its implications for cooperation and the efficiency of bargaining outcomes are discussed and analyzed. Experimental results largely confirm findings reported in the literature: as players learn about the game and the behavior of others, they adjust their decisions accordingly; the subjects also exhibit other-regarding preferences, resulting to the prevalence of relatively equally distributed gains as an outcome. Furthermore, the findings of the study suggest that under the condition of incomplete information about the preferences of other players, the experimental subjects internalize the game as a group. The authors propose that an explanatory variable for such situations might be that actual shared beliefs of pasture users assist players to economize on information processing and coordinate the bargaining in an effective way. From this perspective, the paper raises a series of questions regarding the proposition that power asymmetry leads to inefficient bargaining outcomes, and provides some first insights for further investigation.

Recent global and regional assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) show that Nature's Contributions to People (NCP) are under an alarming threat due to the continuing loss of biodiversity. These assessments call for increasing conservation efforts and a more sustainable use of biodiversity to enhance the chances of halting biodiversity loss and reversing current trends. One of the strategies to achieve change is to mainstream biodiversity into sectoral policies. Mainstreaming, a concept that can be traced back to the Brundtland report, promotes the integration of the environment into political, societal, and economic planning and decision-making. Based on the review of key studies undertaken during the regional assessment for Europe and Central Asia, we develop a stepwise approach to analyze the current status of mainstreaming of biodiversity and NCP. The approach can be used both for policy design purposes and diagnostic evaluations. It demonstrates that mainstreaming has the potential to improve the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity as well as the sustained provision of NCP. However, based on the status of implementation across Europe and Central Asia, we conclude that mainstreaming needs to be pursued and implemented in a stronger and more systematic way. The results of our assessment provide important input to national strategies and policies but also to the ongoing process of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity while developing the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.