Year: 2013
Collections: Research Paper
Topics: Water, Water governance
Authors: Michael Eichholz, Kristof Van Assche, Lisa Oberkircher, Anna-Katharina Hornidge
Countries: Uzbekistan
Source: Journal of Environmental Planning and Management
This article analyzes the governance of land and water resources in rural Uzbekistan through the lens of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological theory. The authors explore how farmers adapt to post-socialist reforms and successive waves of land consolidation by relying on different forms of capital, including social, political, and symbolic capital. The study demonstrates that, in the absence of an open market and transparent rules, access to resources becomes the outcome of continuous negotiations and exchanges of favors. Under conditions of high uncertainty, social networks and proximity to political authorities prove to be more important than direct financial investments. As a result, the rural economy is transformed into a complex system of personal arrangements, where the survival and success of farming households depend on farmers’ ability to convert their informal assets into actual access to land and water resources.
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In this paper, we use Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of capitals and fields in the context of a transitional rural economy. We investigate ways to adopt these concepts for the study of land governance, in an attempt to gain new insights in post-socialist transition. By means of an in-depth study of land and water reform in two Uzbek villages, we reveal the intimate connections between access to water and access to land in the Uzbek rural economy, as well as the wide variety of strategies used by farmers to secure access to these resources. It is argued that the increased importance of the political field, in combination with its increased volatility and the dismantling of Soviet local governance, led to opacity in the conversion rates of capitals, to a bet on land as safe haven, and an ambiguous status of money.
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