Community, state and market : understanding historical water governance evolution in Central Asia

In Central Asia, community water governance insttutons emerged and prevailed for a long tme. By employing an analytcal modelling approach using variants of the evolutonary Hawk-Dove game, we scrutnise three epochs' (pre-Tsarist, Tsarist and Soviet) coordinaton mechanisms and qualitatvely compare them in the efficiency spectrum. We fnd that the pre-Tsarist community water governance settng, due to its synergetc and pluralistc aspects, was associated with higher efficiency than the Tsarist and Soviet periods' settings. The pre-Tsarist community arrangement linked irrigaton dutes with benefits. Our analytcal model reveals how the Tsarist Russian regulaton that replaced the electon-sanctoning element with a de-facto system appointing the irrigaton staff and paying them fixed wages corrupted the well-established pre-Tsarist decentralised water governance. We term this move the "Kaufman drift". Resulting inadequacies in the water governance could have been averted either by restoring the community mechanism's electon-sanctioning attribute or else with an alternative approach such as privatising water resources. With the use of the "Krivoshein game," we produce an alternatve scenario for the region where we envisage the potental consequences of the water privatisaton. Modelling history might not disentangle the complex nature of water governance evoluton fully, however, the heuristics we use in the analysis assist in guiding the diagnosis of the matter and its solution. This makes our study well-timed for contemporary Central Asia. The analyses assess current water management's chances to return to ancient principles of election-sanctoning and perspectives of private irrigaton water rights.