Paper short abstract:

This presentation critically discusses the concept of path dependency and how it is operationalized in research on continuity and change in Central Asia. Recent framings of the term risk over-emphasizing the role of Soviet legacies in ongoing developments, but the concept has more to offer.

Paper long abstract:

Path dependence – or path dependency – is a popular term in the literature on social, political, and environmental change in Central Asia. Typically, the term has been used to explain why a certain problematic condition in the present, such as hierarchical governance structures or unsustainable resource use, is a result of institutions, structures, and processes from the Soviet past. In other words, the term often seems to function as a synonym for Soviet legacies, which are usually framed as something negative. Notably, this understanding of path dependence contradicts earlier conceptualizations of the term in postsocialist transformation research: in particular, David Stark (1992) operationalized the concept to investigate how new development pathways are constrained by the different ‘starting conditions’ after the collapse of socialist regimes, rather than by legacies of the socialist past. In this presentation, I sketch out different path dependency meanings from the literature and show that the concept has more to offer for research in Central Asia than its predominant framing in the field suggests. I illustrate my points with a case study on the adoption of agroforestry practices by farmers in rural Kyrgyzstan to make two basic arguments. First, while Soviet legacies do matter in certain ways for understanding current practices and constraints, new path dependencies have emerged since the early 1990s that seem equally or even more important. Second, not everything from the Soviet past is necessarily negative, which may be missed when framing path dependencies only as barriers for progressive change.