Features of the regulatory framework for cooperation among the Central Asian countries in ensuring water security and overcoming interstate contradictions

Abstract

Having gained independence, the Central Asian countries updated their national security issues, an integral part of which was ensuring water security and establishing multilateral cooperation to overcome the conflict potential in their relations. The problem of interstate regulation of the water issue has been aggravated by the fact that water security is in close interconnection with the problem of energy and human security in these countries and the region as a whole. At the same time, at the beginning of the practice of joint water use, the newly independent republics did not have a regulatory framework and practical experience in transboundary water distribution and neutralization of disputes and conflicts outside the Soviet institutional and legal framework. The article therefore discusses interstate relations between the Central Asian countries on the issue of sharing transboundary rivers of the Aral Sea basin. The article presents the hydrography and the percentage of transboundary rivers runoff, and the water relations development dynamics of the above-mentioned countries is considered from 1991 to the present. The article also provides analysis of the political and legal relationships and the degree of participation of these countries in regional initiatives. It reveals the mechanisms of bilateral and multilateral initiatives, including the principles and directions of the work of the International Fund for saving the Aral Sea and Programs to assist the Aral Sea basin countries as exemplary mechanisms in ensuring social and water-ecological security. Also, the article shows possible scenarios for the situation in the next 30 years and forecasts the likelihood of destabilization in the region. The authors conclude that the most productive mechanism for ensuring the region’s water, energy and social security remains an integrated approach with the active implementation of the principles of integrated water resources management. The authors are convinced in the need to establish more expanded “network” relations at the inter-state level, as well as at the level of regional, subregional and international organizations and improve legal and institutional structures.