Paper long abstract:

There have been extensive discussions within academic and policy circles on why many governance reform initiatives and legal interventions failed in Uzbekistan. In our paper we will engage with these scholarly debates by arguing that laws and policies are comprehensively written on paper but remain poorly implemented in practice due to the contradictions and discrepancy between government reform agenda objectives and socio-political and socio-economic realities. These processes, i.e., divergence between law in books and law in action, are particularly visible in Uzbekistan’s agriculture management policy, namely the agri-cluster model. The cluster model is a chain of different farming and business entities that cooperate vertically (with suppliers or buyers: farmers as cotton producers and textile companies) and compete horizontally (with similar scope businesses: a farmer with another farmer; a textile company with another textile company).

The cluster model can be seen as the latest reform initiative in a series of agricultural transformations that started in Uzbekistan after the collapse of Soviet Union. Uzbekistan shifted its policies from the state-centric management to the private cluster model in few years, when other developing economies like Egypt or India required decades for the same reforms to be implemented among farmers in a genuine way, but not by forced state policy. In this paper, we mostly concentrate on recent cluster-model-based agriculture management reforms of Uzbekistan, which unveiled the cluster model as the most decisive practice to ‘boost’ the privatization, cease the state-centric approach, develop the economy and shift from considering cotton and grain as export commodities, by replacing them with textile and ‘ready to go’ products, but causing uncertainties, social dilemmas, and legal issues among farmers.

Previous research examined Uzbekistan’s agricultural transf0rmations through political, sociological and anthropological lenses, whereas there has been little investigation of these processes from a socio-legal perspective. In our paper we will provide a socio-legal analysis of the agriculture management in Uzbekistan, specifically the cluster chain model, its implementation process, implications to the local business environment in rural areas, and perceptions by local farmers. Theoretically, the paper draws on concepts of legal cultures and living law to analyze the empirical data gathered during the fieldwork conducted in the Jizzakh, Bukhara, and Ferghana regions of Uzbekistan during December 2020-February, 2021, in the frame of the Central Asian Law project at Lund University supported by a Marie Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange H2020 Programme.