From Reform Convergence to Delivery: Water Governance as a Test of Regional Cooperation in Central Asia

Abstract

Central Asia has never been better positioned to solve its water problems on paper. Since 2016, political rapprochement among the five states has been accompanied by the adoption of strikingly similar national water reforms built around integrated water resources management, basin governance, digitalization, and cost recovery, supported by international finance. Yet the 2021 drought caused heavy agricultural losses in four of the five countries, and the region remains unprepared for the next dry cycle. This paper asks why the convergence of reform agendas has not produced water security, and what the answer implies for the regional cooperation agenda. It develops a three-stage analytical framework that follows reforms from adoption, through translation into administrative and financial practice, to performance under climatic stress, and applies it to evidence from document analysis of national strategies and legislation, longitudinal field engagement since 2005, and expert interviews across the five countries. The analysis shows that convergence is produced at the adoption stage by transnational template diffusion, regional political incentives and centralized executives, while a delivery gap opens at the translation stage, where incomplete asset ownership, politically constrained tariffs and a financing shortfall of roughly 40-45 percent of estimated needs leave reformed institutions without operational capability. Dry years then expose this gap and transmit its costs across borders through shared basins. The paper concludes that domestic delivery capability has become a regional security variable, and that the cooperation agenda should shift from declaratory alignment toward regional public goods: harmonized indicators, dry-year protocols, seasonal drought information and jointly prepared investments anchored in existing institutions.