Water Diplomacy in Central Asia: Strategies for Preventing Conflicts in Transboundary Water Governance

Abstract

In Central Asia, cooperation over shared rivers like the Syr Darya has often alternated with periods of tension, especially around water allocation and energy needs (Micklin, 2014). Although regional institutions such as ICWC, IFAS, and the Basin Water Organizations have existed for more than 30 years, high‑level political commitments often fail to translate into stable institutional practices (Zinzani, 2015; UNDP, 2017). The present literature provides significant understanding of the Soviet legacy, the water–energy nexus, institutional fragmentation, and climate stress. However, these different strands of scholarship largely remain unconnected. Consequently, little is known about how political commitments are interpreted across different levels of governance or why implementation gaps persist. This paper identifies these disparities and explores how presidential-level statements on Central Asia are conveyed through institutional mechanisms and find, or not, their expression in the actual practices in the Syr Darya basin. The research, based on a qualitative case study design, examines political statements, protocols of the ICWC and IFAS, BWO Syr Darya operational reports, and regional water-energy agreements in the period from 1995 to 2023. It applies multi-level governance theory combined with institutionalism and constructivism to trace the linkages between political intent, institutional decision-making, and reservoir management. Recurring bottlenecks and changes over time emerge when documents are systematically organized and thematically coded. These results demonstrate that diplomatic rapprochement, especially since 2016, has increased political willingness to cooperate, although often institutional capacity and operational realities have not kept pace. Cooperation strengthens in times of crisis but weakens when stability is reached, while structural asymmetries between upstream and downstream states continuously affect the outcome. This paper helps in having a clear understanding of political signals in relation to institutional constraints, which can help learn lessons for conditions under which more robust and better water diplomacy could potentially be achieved in the Syr Darya River Basin. This basin-specific method of analysis remedies essential gaps in water diplomacy studies, connecting politics, institutional actions, and practices in water, conflict, and climate issues, providing practical strategies in conflict prevention, region-level trust establishment, and SDG6/16 realization.