State Making and Environmental Cooperation: Linking Domestic and International Politics in Central Asia.

• Author: Papagianni, Katia
• Position: Book Review

By Erika Weinthal Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002, 224 pages

By the end of the 1980s, it was readily apparent that the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest in-land sea in the world and source of sustenance for several hundred thousand people, was disappearing. In the 1960s, Soviet authorities began removing water from the rivers of the Aral basin for irrigation of the Soviet cotton fields in Central Asia. To sustain this practice, Soviet central planners imposed a water-sharing scheme on the region, which privileged agriculture over the protection of the sea. Leaders in the Central Asian republics implemented Soviet orders and ran the system based on financial transfers from Moscow. The result of this routine was the rapid dessication of the Aral Sea: in just 30 years, the sea receded by as much as 60 to 80 kilometers at any given point.

In her book, State Making and Environmental Cooperation, Erika Weinthal explores two questions that bear directly on the Aral Sea crisis. First, why were the Central Asian states able to successfully cooperate in managing their shared water resources after the breakup of the Soviet Union, thus avoiding much anticipated conflict over the shared resource? This development is puzzling, Weinthal argues, given the prevailing uncertainty and complex political and social transformations in the region at the time. Second, the author questions why interstate cooperation did not reverse this environmental disaster. According to Weinthal, Central Asian leaders and international institutions involved in the region's water politics failed to address the source of the environmental disaster in the Aral Sea-intensive cotton production.

Weinthal argues that the assistance of international institutions and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to the governments of the Aral basin were essential in thwarting an outbreak of interstate conflict in the region. The author emphasizes that during the process of state-building, weak states, like those in Central Asia, require international legitimacy; cooperation with international institutions and use of the resources these institutions offer is essential to this effort. Thus, Weinthal contends that weak states are more likely than strong ones to cooperate with international institutions and NGOs.

According to Weinthal, external actors possessed valuable financial resources that the Central Asian states desperately needed following their abrupt separation from Moscow. These...