Abstract:

Kazakhstan promotes active citizenship and introduced state-sanctioned consultative bodies such as public councils into an existing illiberal public administration system. The state granted relative autonomous status to public councils and at the same time imposes informal control on social problem resolution by council members. This study aims to examine why local state bodies informally control socio-economic problem resolution by regional public councils in Kazakhstan. For that purpose, this research applies Teets’ consultative authoritarianism framework, which suggests the state encourages a fairly autonomous civil society and subjects them to indirect differentiated state control. The data has been collected in four regional public councils of Kazakhstan through semi-structured interviews (N=70) and non-participant observations of public councils’ meetings with state bodies. The findings suggest that local state bodies informally control socio-economic problem resolution to secure state officials' interests and for the benefit of national and regional business elites. As an example, some socio-economic problems related to public transportation and housing prone to corruption and entail state officials’ financial interests, which pushes the local state officials to informally control the public councils’ decisions on these problems. Also, business elites’ financial projects that are subject to public council discussions, due to the informal state control fail to serve for the benefit of the general public. This study contributes to the literature on consultative mechanisms in authoritarian settings such as Kazakhstan.