Flaunting Aridity?: Examining Perceptions of Central Asia as Water-Scarce and Resource-Rich

• In Event: The Social Life of Water Discourses in Central Asia

Abstract

In the context of climate change, Central Asia is currently often discussed as water-scarce, and facing an impending crisis. Yet in global perspective, Central Asia overall is not considered ‘water-poor’. This paper investigates such differing assessments of water scarcity, and their impact, by tracing the trajectories of conceptualizing the region - and its uses from the 1950s. I draw on my own ethnographic and archival research along the Naryn river in Kyrgyzstan between 2014 and 2016. I also bring in comparative material from a group research project on the ‘social life’ of the Syr Darya river, which traverses four republics before reaching the northern Aral Sea. ‘Leaking’ from the consequences of industrialized irrigation agriculture, the wide-spread notion of water scarcity is relatively new, despite long-standing 'hot-spots' of restricted water access in steppe and desert oases. I argue that water ‘scarcity’ is to a substantial degree a function of economic and consumption choices, including the obstinate monopoly on very thirsty cotton crops in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the equally obstinate insistence on big dams as the single solution to energy scarcity, in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I therefore ask: who identifies water scarcity, who is made responsible, who proposes and controls solutions to scarcity? I contextualize these notions in broader understandings of Central Asia as rich or poor in certain resources, and the role these are made to play in regional planning.

Author

• Jeanne Eileen Feaux de la Croix, U of Tübingen (Germany)