ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on people attention on seven Water User Associations (WUAs) spread throughout five regions of Uzbekistan— Fergana Valley, the Tashkent region, Karakalpakstan, Jizzhak, and Syr Darya— and primarily on the major crops of cotton and wheat. It shows that the results are generally positive, yet mixed, with three cases reporting improvements in both crop productivity and environmental sustainability, and several cases reporting some drop in productivity coupled with environmental improvement. The chapter explains three alternative explanations— the presence of formal institutions, physical wealth, or informal institutions. It shows that the policy performance of the Uzbek WUAs supports the informal institutions thesis, which does a markedly better job of explaining outcomes in these seven cases than the physical wealth framework, and a better job than the formal institutions approach. The analysis proceeds with a methods section and a reporting of the crop productivity and environmental sustainability "outcomes" for each WUA before turning to the several alternative frameworks and their results.
