German Water Diplomacy in Central Asia

Abstract

Central Asia has a long history of challenges with water management. The region does not suffer from water scarcity, but its water resources are unequally distributed temporally and spatially. As a legacy of the Soviet Union, the five states of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) share a vast transboundary water infrastructure that necessitates transboundary cooperation on water management. However, attempts to cooperate on water management have not been successful. Water remains a highly contested resource and its provision is increasingly threatened by climate change. Germany has been engaging in water diplomacy in Central Asia since 2008 with the Water Initiative Central Asia, also known as the “Berlin Process”, to support the five Central Asian states in the development of system of sustainable transboundary water management. The initiative included activities aimed at rehabilitating infrastructure, fostering transboundary cooperation, expanding research and data collection capacities, and training water professionals and public servants with capacity building measures. In 2020, it was continued by the Green Central Asia Initiative, which expanded the scope, aiming at fostering cooperation on adapting to the impacts of climate change in general. Academic research on these two water diplomacy initiatives has been limited, so this master thesis provides a comprehensive account of both by means of a document analysis of over 100 sources which discusses the goals, involved actors, structure and realised activities of both initiatives. Based on an in-depth analysis of the reviewed literature, a conceptual framework of nine factors required for the establishment of a system of sustainable transboundary water management within the framework of water diplomacy has been developed. The nine factors are political assent, mutual benefit, financing, data, innovation, governance, capacity development, trust, and institutional anchoring. Each factor is required for a system of sustainable transboundary water management to be established between states and to persist over time, albeit at different stages of the water diplomacy engagement. This framework offers an analytical approach to assess the extent to which the respective water diplomacy activities contribute to fulfilling each of the factors, and therewith to the establishment of a system of sustainable transboundary water management. The analysis finds that Germany’s water diplomacy engagement in Central Asia has provided a comprehensive approach that has addressed each of these factors. Therewith, Germany has substantially contributed to advancing the process of establishing a system of sustainable transboundary water management in Central Asia; however, the process is still ongoing, thus a final assessment cannot be made yet.