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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. ; Peer Reviewed

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.