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Paper abstract:

Central Asia is well-suited to renewable energy development (World Bank 2020). Kazakhstan is rich with natural resources and it is home to extensive land for wind and solar projects (GSA 2020; GWA 2019). Its mines, though currently under unsustainable mining practices, contain metals essential for low-carbon technology (Bogdetsky 2001; Hughes 2012; OECD 2019), and there are more yet to be tapped for their resources. With the right policies, Kazakh big cities and monotowns could improve their own ecology and create economic models built around sustainable development models. Hopeful onlookers see these opportunities as a pathway to other benefits: technology spillovers, human capital growth and institutional build-up to meet Sustainable Development Goals.

This paper investigates how and why, despite its failure to attain sustainable economic growth, prosperity and equity, neoliberalism’s strange non-death (Crouch, 2011) has continued to undermine sustainability and obstruct the emergence of new socio-economic agenda in Kazakhstan. As the recent case with a small monotown, Ekibastuz, has demonstrated, these outcomes are uncertain (Dechezleprêtre, Martin and Mohnen 2017; Garret-Peltier 2017). This winter has witnessed complete collapse of the town’s thermal power plant which left without heating more than 200 houses and provoked talks about evacuation of the entire town population. Beyond this technological disaster, many Kazakh cities face all the marks of underdevelopment: extensive ecological damage, rising regional inequality, exodus of people who cannot find decent jobs, dilapidated infrastructure and city slums. Since the early 1990s when Kazakhstan has undergone through a radical neoliberal restructuring, Kazakh monotowns were turned into the sources of ‘initial capital accumulation’ that have been used for upward and outward wealth and income redistribution. Both transnational and national comprador capital have employed neoliberal socio-economic paradigm to institutionalize current status-quo. The latter, in turn, is legitimized by the mainstream development agenda that includes neoclassical economics concepts such as the importance of foreign direct investments, economic growth and ‘green capitalism’. The paper argues for new approaches in socio-economic development and the need to build alternative paradigms that will promote truly sustainable development for the monotowns and the whole region.