Water resource management in Central Asia: a Japanese attempt to promote water resource efficiency

ABSTRACT

This paper examines one instance of a capacity-building attempt by Japan to reduce water demand and increase the efficiency of scarce water resource use in Central Asia. Focusing on Japanese involvement in Uzbekistan, this paper demonstrates how Japan attempted to define priority areas, assistance principles and approaches to address this issue. Through its involvement, Japan attempted to place a great degree of trust and confidence in this region. The outcomes of these efforts to create water demand reduction and management schemes have been only partially successful. The Japanese “Integrated Water Resources Management” (IWRM) proposal met with limited success because of its various logistical and conceptual weaknesses. However, the demand for a water reduction agenda and the efficient consumption of water were well received by all participants and stakeholders.

KEYWORDS:

• Water scarcity
• water-user associations
• assistance
• Central Asia
• Japan

Notes

¹For instance, the critique of functionalism challenges the assumption of the spillover effect. Neo-functionalists do not reject the functionalist approach or the criticisms of functionalism. Rather, they take an intermediate position, arguing that functional spillover emphasizes the idea that when a group of countries embarks on a cooperation scheme or limited economic integration, spillover effects arise that drive them to higher levels of interrelationships. Countries might enter into one form of cooperation that includes the free movement of goods, services and factors but excluding monetary matters; however, they end up with another, more expansive form.

²Personal communication with a high-ranking official at the Ministry of Water Management of Uzbekistan, August 2003.

³Ibid., p. 16. Trushin (1993) advocated the idea of payments for the delivery of water to certain states as compensation for the amortization and modernization of facilities rather than for water as a product. He insists that the water in CA should be considered a regional property and not a national property.

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Timur Dadabaev

Dr. Timur Dadabaev is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Tsukuba and concurrently Adjunct Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology, University of Tokyo. His latest monographic books are Identity and Memory in Post-Soviet Central Asia (Routledge, 2015) and Japan in Central Asia (Palgrave, 2015).