Join us for the School of Environmental Studies Colloquium Series featuring PhD Candidate Nodir Ataev
Location: BioSciences Complex, Room 1120
Flows of Water, Flows of Power: Local Water Inequalities in the Ak-Suu and Kozu-Baglan/Khodzhabakirgan River Basins
Abstract:
Using two transboundary river basins between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan as case studies, this chapter examines how local water inequalities are produced and reproduced through everyday agricultural and water-use practices. Based on fieldwork with farmers, water officials, and development practitioners, it reveals a persistent disconnect between dominant technocratic water policy and development imaginaries centered on efficiency, scarcity, and institutional reform, and farmers’ lived experiences of unequal access to land, water, infrastructure, and socio-environmental conditions. While state policy and development interventions frame water governance as a neutral technical challenge, the chapter shows how power relations (re)produce uneven hydrosocial territories. Drawing on the notion of water justice, it demonstrates how depoliticized water governance obscures and, in some cases, exacerbates local water injustices.
Bio:
I am a PhD student from Kyrgyzstan in the Department of Global Development Studies. I have over a decade of experience in the development aid sector, and my research focuses on the intersections of political ecology, agrarian transformation, and water governance. My doctoral thesis examines questions of water access and justice through a case study of the Fergana Valley.