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PUB02


Sustainable Development and New Socio-Economic Policy in Central Asia: Beyond Mainstream Orthodoxy [English] 
Convenor:
Kuat Akizhanov (KazGUU)
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Chair:
Balihar Sanghera (University of Kent)
Discussant:
Serik Orazgaliyev (Nazarbayev University)
Format:
Panel
Theme:
Public Administration & Public Policy
Location:
Lawrence Hall: room 107
Sessions:
Saturday 21 October, -
Time zone: America/New_York

Abstract:

More than thirty years of market-oriented development in the post-Soviet Central Asian countries has transformed them into capitalist regimes within global capitalist architecture characterized by Global North and Global South dichotomy. The socio-economic and political processes that have taken place in the region are marked by some idiosyncratic characteristics. However, these peculiarities do not make Kazakhstan very different from Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan too different from Turkmenistan from the perspective of sustainable development. Some countries of the region such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are marked by the dominance of neoliberal ideology in their socio-economic policy governance (Sanghera and Satybaldieva, 2021). Others such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are more authoritarian and have demonstrated autarkic tendencies (Alam and Banerji, 2000). What is common for all Central Asian states is how the concept of development has been negatively transformed over the last thirty years in these resource-abundant countries through the capitalist restructuring resulting in intense inequalities. From the perspective of long-term socio-economic sustainability, numerous signs of disruption are evident. Among the most immediate episodes are the inability of these countries to cope with the Covid-19 pandemic, the vulnerability of their economies in the face of the Russian invasion to Ukraine and rather fragile socio-economic models built around extensive exploitation of their natural resources and migrant remittance. Global development architecture premised on the ‘market episteme’ where market-oriented restructuring and commercial interests are at the center of policy solutions has been adopted and implemented in the region’s countries regardless of their negative impact on social progress (Amin, 2006; Appel and Orenstein, 2016).

Even within recently launched decolonization narratives and scholarship (Gorshenina, 2021; Bichsel, 2022) epistemic injustice is epitomized in the region in countless ‘modernization projects’ that embed Central Asian countries even deeper into the global unequal power relations. This panel seeks to advance scholarship on the critical understanding of the mainstream socio-economic and, more broadly, development policies to launch debates around non-orthodox and heterodox approaches that are aimed to achieve progressive results. While doing so, we attempt to minimize the risk of exoticising, essentialising and pathologising the region. The panel is open to methodological and theoretical perspectives based on interdisciplinary approach and welcomes papers related to all aspects of the alternative socio-economic development. This panel encourages papers that discuss empirical, theoretical and methodological approaches that advance paradigm shift in the current sustainability debate in the Central Asian countries.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Saturday 21 October, 2023, -