**2. Water politics in Uzbekistan**

Contemporary Uzbekistan, or formally, Republic of Uzbekistan, is one of the independent post-Soviet Central Asian States. It was created in early 1930s, when the decision of Moscow defined its geographic boundaries, as well as those of other several republics, on the territory which was then called the Soviet Turkestan [1]. The political objective of that time was to boost Soviet Union's economic performance within which the Soviet Uzbek Republic acquired a specialization in the political economic system of the Soviet Union—it supplied cotton for Russian textile mills [1]. Cotton production mediated important links between Moscow, local elites, and regional elites which altogether ensured that the cotton production plan was fulfilled [2] in exchange for additional financial transfers from Moscow [2].

Uzbekistan's cotton agriculture was based on the irrigation where the main canal feeding the farms had been constructed in Fergana Valley three centuries earlier and supplemented with 1960s irrigation infrastructure built to draw vast amounts of irrigation water from the region's two major rivers, Amu Darya and Syr Darya [3]. The Soviet planners insistent on maximum cotton output and the country engaged in an intensive monoculture to foster cotton production through expansion of irrigated areas. Between 1960 and 1990, the irrigated areas in the country increased by 2 million hectares (about 60% of all irrigated land in Central Asia) [2]. The Soviet administration enforced a specific organization of agricultural work through massive collectivization to consolidate individual landholding and labor into collective farms called "kolkhoz" (collectively owned) and "sovkhoz" (state owned) forms of agricultural production cooperatives [4]. In a kolkhoz, the workers received a share of the farm's product and profit according to the number of days worked. In a sovkhoz, the workers received a fixed salary. The Soviet state administration developed and imposed work programs for these collective farms and nominated their preferred managers (brigadirs). By 1990, Uzbekistan had about 940 kolkhoz and more than a 1000 of sovkhoz [5]. In mid-1990, the Soviet Uzbek Republic adopted a Law on Land, which allowed individual to hold land for private plots and individual farms on long-term lease [5]. The law permitted tenure to be inherited but did not permit agricultural land to be privately owned.

In 1991, the USSR collapsed and Uzbekistan gained sovereignty. The Government of independent Uzbekistan initiated a policy of transition from the Soviet centrally planned economy to a market economy [6]. Farm restructuring was one of the major components of the transition agenda with land management and water reforms that ensued. Policy shifts took place in the context where the trading links with other republics which were previously orchestrated by Moscow were now disrupted and resulted in shortfall of grain. Dissolution of collective farms led to massive unemployment and livelihood insecurity among the population, especially in the rural areas [2]. The Uzbek government responded to the shortages by expanding the acreage of land devoted to wheat production and increased the size of private plots that population became entitled to [2]. The agrarian reform oscillated between increasing access to private land, structural reform agenda imposed by international donors, and measures to tighten and restrict private access to land in an effort to control the production of cotton [2].

Aral Sea, I describe the everyday struggles these people, who are mostly women, engage to make their living and provide subsistence to their families in situation of economic trauma, environmental disaster, and massive out-migration of male population. This analysis puts forward the local voices of real people whose lives are being restructured by sustainability oriented actions. Such perspective is often missed in scholarly and professional literature. These findings are hoped to assist policy developers in formulating irrigation programs in ways that would embrace sustainability both in terms of environmental and social justice.

Contemporary Uzbekistan, or formally, Republic of Uzbekistan, is one of the independent post-Soviet Central Asian States. It was created in early 1930s, when the decision of Moscow defined its geographic boundaries, as well as those of other several republics, on the territory which was then called the Soviet Turkestan [1]. The political objective of that time was to boost Soviet Union's economic performance within which the Soviet Uzbek Republic acquired a specialization in the political economic system of the Soviet Union—it supplied cotton for Russian textile mills [1]. Cotton production mediated important links between Moscow, local elites, and regional elites which altogether ensured that the cotton production plan was ful-

Uzbekistan's cotton agriculture was based on the irrigation where the main canal feeding the farms had been constructed in Fergana Valley three centuries earlier and supplemented with 1960s irrigation infrastructure built to draw vast amounts of irrigation water from the region's two major rivers, Amu Darya and Syr Darya [3]. The Soviet planners insistent on maximum cotton output and the country engaged in an intensive monoculture to foster cotton production through expansion of irrigated areas. Between 1960 and 1990, the irrigated areas in the country increased by 2 million hectares (about 60% of all irrigated land in Central Asia) [2]. The Soviet administration enforced a specific organization of agricultural work through massive collectivization to consolidate individual landholding and labor into collective farms called "kolkhoz" (collectively owned) and "sovkhoz" (state owned) forms of agricultural production cooperatives [4]. In a kolkhoz, the workers received a share of the farm's product and profit according to the number of days worked. In a sovkhoz, the workers received a fixed salary. The Soviet state administration developed and imposed work programs for these collective farms and nominated their preferred managers (brigadirs). By 1990, Uzbekistan had about 940 kolkhoz and more than a 1000 of sovkhoz [5]. In mid-1990, the Soviet Uzbek Republic adopted a Law on Land, which allowed individual to hold land for private plots and individual farms on long-term lease [5]. The law permitted tenure to be inherited but did not

In 1991, the USSR collapsed and Uzbekistan gained sovereignty. The Government of independent Uzbekistan initiated a policy of transition from the Soviet centrally planned economy to a market economy [6]. Farm restructuring was one of the major components of the transition agenda with land management and water reforms that ensued. Policy shifts took place in the context where the trading links with other republics which were previously orchestrated

filled [2] in exchange for additional financial transfers from Moscow [2].

**2. Water politics in Uzbekistan**

66 Water and Sustainability

permit agricultural land to be privately owned.

Agrarian reforms transformed collective farms to collective enterprises, then, again, restructured them as joint-stock companies and, lastly, established private enterprises such as independent farms [7]. The private farms were made distinct from peasant farms in that they had a legal status, had a leasehold of up to 50 years, had a minimum of 10 hectares for cotton and wheat, and their land use was restricted to specific agricultural activities as specified in the lease contracts [2]. The peasant farms had optional legal status, had a life-long inheritable tenure, could only use family members and relatives as labor, had a maximum size up to 1 ha, and might use their land for any agricultural activities. The private farms were the subject to a mandatory system of production quotas and state orders on production of cotton and wheat [6]. Prices were fixed by the government-controlled agencies and well below the market prices. The state used a system of contracting private farmers, whereby they became bound to continue to plant a certain acreage of cotton [2]. Should they fail to supply the expected amount, the producers were subject to punitive measures such as revoking their leases. In return, producers were supplied with rationing of inputs such as land, water, equipment, etc. As Kandiyoti [2] argued, this was an attempt of the government to pass on the production risks to the independent farmers, while maintaining the state control over the procurement of strategic crops such as cotton and wheat. The small holders endured no state demands aside from land tax.

As in Kandiyoti [2], Uzbekistan's agrarian reform systematically disadvantaged women. For example, when the members of collective farms were redefined as shareholders, women received much smaller shares than men because those were distributed on the basis of the length of service and final salaries. Women, most of them were unskilled workers with shorter working years and frequent maternity leaves fared considerable less than men. The notion that farms were to be managed by men was becoming a fact.

The importance of land for sustaining rural livelihoods also underwent changes. In contrast to the Soviet period, where individual holding did not play a significant role, in sovereign Uzbekistan, subsistence and informal income from individual crop cultivation became central to families surviving strategies [8]. When waged employment became permanently deficit, state benefits became irregular and curtailed, reliance on households and subsidiary plots for self-subsistence increased substantially, and rural households turned to self-provisioning and sale or barter of produce [2].

In contemporary Uzbekistan, agriculture accounts to 30% of GPD, 60% of foreign exchange receipts, and about 40% of employment [9]. Private farms carry on producing cotton for the state international commerce and make Uzbekistan now the world's fourth largest producer of cotton [10]. This happens despite the fact that the Uzbekistan currently suffers a serious water shortage [10]. The country continues to use the same irrigation sources and infrastructure, mainly from Syr Darya and Amu Darya rivers, which feed the landlocked Aral Sea which used to be one of the world's largest saline lakes. But when the Soviet government decided to divert these rivers to irrigate the desert areas surrounding the Sea to supply irrigation to agriculture, the inflow was reduced from more than 50 cubic kilometers of water in 1960, to 42.5 in 1973, 8.3 by 1980, and 0 by 1982 [5].

biodiversity (UNCBD) and desertification (UNCCD), some of the European countries started expressing interests in joining cooperation to address the Aral Sea crisis. In this chapter, the focus is on the German Government's response to the challenges posed by these three conventions and their importance for its national research and development strategy. In mid-1990s, The German Development Cooperation, a large government-sponsored worldwide organization for international cooperation, announced among its priorities combating desertification of Central Asian region through efficient water and land use in the Aral Sea region (in its report to the UN Secretariat for the UNCCD) [14]. Since 1992, German the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the German largest governmental funding agency that takes an overarching responsibility for science and research-related policies [15], BMBF cooperated with UNESCO providing funding for projects with the aim to assess and respond to damage to the Aral Sea's ecosystems. The first such project took place in 1993–1999 with a budget of US\$ 1.2 million and supported the network of 140 scientists from Central Asia and Russia who worked on 20 vari-

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In 2001, BMBF proposed the second project called "Economic and Ecological Restructuring of land and Water Use in the Region Khorezm, Uzbekistan", worth US\$10 million which lasted from 2001 to 2010. The Center for Development Research at Bonn University in Germany developed and implemented it in close cooperation with UNESCO and Urgench State University in Uzbekistan. The project (henceforth, BMBF-UNESCO project) aimed at addressing environmental, social, and economic problems in Khorezm, one of the three provinces in the Aral Sea zone "in the context of the Aral Sea crisis to provide sound, science-based policy recommendations for sustainably improving the natural resource use" ([14] p. 6). Part of the project focused on rational water and land use via a shift toward sustainable land and water resource management. It was expected that sustainable resource use would lead to more efficient agriculture and improve rural livelihoods. This project is the focus of this chapter where I show complexity of operationalizing the concept of sustainability in specific projects and programs. The BMBF-UNESCO project was subdivided into phases. The first two phases were implemented in 2001–2006 with an overall goal to develop region-specific innovative technologies in land and water use via scientific modeling. During phases I and II, project scientists compiled databases and completed baseline investigations of groundwater and soil salinity, estimated water budgets for regional irrigations, assessed soil conservation agriculture, etc. On the basis of this knowledge, a number of the so-called "plausible solutions" were selected to be applied in real-life settings during phase 3. Phase 3 explicitly provided space for social issues within technical options for sustainable land and water use management. Phase 3 planners committed to notions of sustainability on the basis of participation, bottom-up approaches, and improved rural livelihoods. In one of the project components, it was envisioned that sustainable water use could be achieved by introducing community-based water management through an improved operation of the existing WUA. This was one of the promising solutions, an innovation to be followed. The idea was that target groups participated in testing the innovations together and used them independently once the proposed solutions proved suitable and sustainable. The work on WUA started in 2008 under the name "Social mobilization and institutional development (SMID)", whereby the project was to improve the local WUA which had been assessed as "weak." This work was expected to improve "the livelihoods of rural inhabitants and enhance productivity of the irrigated agriculture

ous subprojects.

The Aral Sea started to desiccate, and in later 1990s, its water level was only one-fifth of what it used to be four decades earlier [3]. By 2007, the Aral Sea had shrunk to 10% of its original size [3, 11]. Today, it is recognized as one of the largest environmental disasters, an environmental, social, and economic tragedy which poses environmental, social, economic, humanitarian, public health, and other risks [11]. Today, people living around the Aral Sea (about 60 million people) are some of the poorest in Central Asia and suffer declining fresh water supply, pollution, violent sand storm, and public health risks [11].

Beginning in early 1990, global communities drew their attention to the Aral Sea problem and its insinuating links with regional and global security issues. At the 48th and 50th session of the UN General Assembly on September 28, 1993 and on October 1995, Central Asian Delegation appealed to the global community to help save the Aral Sea. In 2010, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon called the Aral Sea crisis "clearly one of the worst environmental disasters in the world" [12]. He urged the central Asian leaders to cooperate and seek for solutions and promised that "all specialized agencies of the United Nations will provide necessary assistance and expertise" [12]. A number of UN programs were initiated to improve economic, food, health, and environmental security among the poor rural communities of the Aral Sea-affected areas. Under the auspices of the United Nations, in September 2015, the government of Uzbekistan initiated the establishment of a Trust Fund for the Aral Sea. In 2017, the current UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited the Aral Sea basin and made a public statement about it expressing his concerns and calling for remedial action [13].

Since 1991, many water-related programs and projects were implemented by the international donor communities and made significant contributions to the agricultural sector in Uzbekistan through infrastructure rehabilitation, installation of water monitoring systems, etc. Funding agencies included Asian Development Bank, Global Environmental Facility, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the German Agency for International Cooperation, European Union, Japan International Cooperation Agency, etc. One of the biggest projects was the Asian Development Bank's Amu Bukhara Irrigation System Rehabilitation project with funding of US\$ 320 million. All of these projects introduced important changes in the management of irrigation and fresh water, built local capacity, and produced large researchbased knowledge; however, a short survey of these project demonstrates while the project self-describe themselves as successful, and they also demonstrate lack of attention to waterscarce regions of Uzbekistan and intra-project coordination and cooperation.

## **3. Sustainability project**

Instigated by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro and its resultant international conventions on climate change (UNFCCC), biodiversity (UNCBD) and desertification (UNCCD), some of the European countries started expressing interests in joining cooperation to address the Aral Sea crisis. In this chapter, the focus is on the German Government's response to the challenges posed by these three conventions and their importance for its national research and development strategy. In mid-1990s, The German Development Cooperation, a large government-sponsored worldwide organization for international cooperation, announced among its priorities combating desertification of Central Asian region through efficient water and land use in the Aral Sea region (in its report to the UN Secretariat for the UNCCD) [14]. Since 1992, German the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), the German largest governmental funding agency that takes an overarching responsibility for science and research-related policies [15], BMBF cooperated with UNESCO providing funding for projects with the aim to assess and respond to damage to the Aral Sea's ecosystems. The first such project took place in 1993–1999 with a budget of US\$ 1.2 million and supported the network of 140 scientists from Central Asia and Russia who worked on 20 various subprojects.

used to be one of the world's largest saline lakes. But when the Soviet government decided to divert these rivers to irrigate the desert areas surrounding the Sea to supply irrigation to agriculture, the inflow was reduced from more than 50 cubic kilometers of water in 1960, to

The Aral Sea started to desiccate, and in later 1990s, its water level was only one-fifth of what it used to be four decades earlier [3]. By 2007, the Aral Sea had shrunk to 10% of its original size [3, 11]. Today, it is recognized as one of the largest environmental disasters, an environmental, social, and economic tragedy which poses environmental, social, economic, humanitarian, public health, and other risks [11]. Today, people living around the Aral Sea (about 60 million people) are some of the poorest in Central Asia and suffer declining fresh water

Beginning in early 1990, global communities drew their attention to the Aral Sea problem and its insinuating links with regional and global security issues. At the 48th and 50th session of the UN General Assembly on September 28, 1993 and on October 1995, Central Asian Delegation appealed to the global community to help save the Aral Sea. In 2010, the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon called the Aral Sea crisis "clearly one of the worst environmental disasters in the world" [12]. He urged the central Asian leaders to cooperate and seek for solutions and promised that "all specialized agencies of the United Nations will provide necessary assistance and expertise" [12]. A number of UN programs were initiated to improve economic, food, health, and environmental security among the poor rural communities of the Aral Sea-affected areas. Under the auspices of the United Nations, in September 2015, the government of Uzbekistan initiated the establishment of a Trust Fund for the Aral Sea. In 2017, the current UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, visited the Aral Sea basin and made a public statement about it expressing his concerns and calling for remedial action [13].

Since 1991, many water-related programs and projects were implemented by the international donor communities and made significant contributions to the agricultural sector in Uzbekistan through infrastructure rehabilitation, installation of water monitoring systems, etc. Funding agencies included Asian Development Bank, Global Environmental Facility, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation, the World Bank, Food and Agriculture Organization, United Nations Development Programme, USAID, the German Agency for International Cooperation, European Union, Japan International Cooperation Agency, etc. One of the biggest projects was the Asian Development Bank's Amu Bukhara Irrigation System Rehabilitation project with funding of US\$ 320 million. All of these projects introduced important changes in the management of irrigation and fresh water, built local capacity, and produced large researchbased knowledge; however, a short survey of these project demonstrates while the project self-describe themselves as successful, and they also demonstrate lack of attention to water-

Instigated by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro and its resultant international conventions on climate change (UNFCCC),

scarce regions of Uzbekistan and intra-project coordination and cooperation.

**3. Sustainability project**

42.5 in 1973, 8.3 by 1980, and 0 by 1982 [5].

68 Water and Sustainability

supply, pollution, violent sand storm, and public health risks [11].

In 2001, BMBF proposed the second project called "Economic and Ecological Restructuring of land and Water Use in the Region Khorezm, Uzbekistan", worth US\$10 million which lasted from 2001 to 2010. The Center for Development Research at Bonn University in Germany developed and implemented it in close cooperation with UNESCO and Urgench State University in Uzbekistan. The project (henceforth, BMBF-UNESCO project) aimed at addressing environmental, social, and economic problems in Khorezm, one of the three provinces in the Aral Sea zone "in the context of the Aral Sea crisis to provide sound, science-based policy recommendations for sustainably improving the natural resource use" ([14] p. 6). Part of the project focused on rational water and land use via a shift toward sustainable land and water resource management. It was expected that sustainable resource use would lead to more efficient agriculture and improve rural livelihoods. This project is the focus of this chapter where I show complexity of operationalizing the concept of sustainability in specific projects and programs.

The BMBF-UNESCO project was subdivided into phases. The first two phases were implemented in 2001–2006 with an overall goal to develop region-specific innovative technologies in land and water use via scientific modeling. During phases I and II, project scientists compiled databases and completed baseline investigations of groundwater and soil salinity, estimated water budgets for regional irrigations, assessed soil conservation agriculture, etc. On the basis of this knowledge, a number of the so-called "plausible solutions" were selected to be applied in real-life settings during phase 3. Phase 3 explicitly provided space for social issues within technical options for sustainable land and water use management. Phase 3 planners committed to notions of sustainability on the basis of participation, bottom-up approaches, and improved rural livelihoods. In one of the project components, it was envisioned that sustainable water use could be achieved by introducing community-based water management through an improved operation of the existing WUA. This was one of the promising solutions, an innovation to be followed. The idea was that target groups participated in testing the innovations together and used them independently once the proposed solutions proved suitable and sustainable. The work on WUA started in 2008 under the name "Social mobilization and institutional development (SMID)", whereby the project was to improve the local WUA which had been assessed as "weak." This work was expected to improve "the livelihoods of rural inhabitants and enhance productivity of the irrigated agriculture through better water management" ([20] p. 5). The SMID approach relied on two major directions which were seen as appropriate for attaining the envisioned goal. One component of the work called Social Mobilization aimed at making the WUA known and understood by the villagers in order to generate "ownership, social, monetary and labor support from the water users to the WUA" ([21] p. 1) to its WUA and an overall wider "inclusion of the large share of water users and their concerns into the decision making processes of the WUA" ([20] p. 1). The second direction was called Institutional Development which stressed the importance of WUA's organizational growth as an entity with managerial and governance mandates. Within this component of SMID, the WUA was expected to improve its capacities to manage water distribution, its financial operations, and resolve water-related conflicts. For the purposes of both, social mobilization and institutional strengthening of the WUA, the SMID approach prescribed a selection of so-called "social mobilizers,"' that is, a widely accepted term for teams which conduct social mobilization [20]. The social mobilizers were responsible not only for the dissemination of the information about the role and usefulness of the WUA to the various stakeholders as mentioned above, but also (and with prior training) for the formation of subclusters identified as the Water User Groups (WUG). Formally, WUG were defined as autonomous informal self-organized groups of people united by the proximity of their land to a particular irrigation source, that is, canal/ditch/pump (later called a "hydrological unit") who manage their own irrigation system to support WUA and account to it [22]. WUG, thus, represented a lower level in a multi-tier system of WUA, where the representative of each WUG participated in the decision-making by becoming a constituent in a WUA council.

plot of land of 0.13 ha called "tamorka" [18]. These tamorka plots comprise about 20% of the irrigated land of Khorezm and play significant role for the livelihoods of the households [18]. Crops in Khorezm are cultivated with a peculiar rural ecology due to high soil salinity annual

Sustainability of Irrigation in Uzbekistan: Implications for Women Farmers

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.79732

71

Based on such a system of pre-determined production of strategic crops, irrigation management entities at national, regional, and local levels determine crop water requirements and develop delivery plans for each cropping season. Khorezm is located in the tail end of Amu Darya River and relies on upstream areas for water supply. Its irrigation infrastructure consists of about 5 km of water diverted from Amu Darya River through 16,000 km of irrigation channels [18]. During droughts, the water is reduced by 40% [18]. The arriving water is partly stored in a local Tuyamuyun water reservoir, and its volume is then rationed. Irrigation is a key factor for the fulfillment of production quotas. Quantity of water to be allocated is determined on the basis of the size of the irrigated areas, types of crops, and the irrigation norms determined by the state [6]. The allocation of water supply is carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources and passed on to basin irrigation system authority, to sub-

The technical delivery of irrigation water through maintaining and operating the irrigation and drainage network is the responsibility of the state water management organizations such as the Main Canal Management units of the sub-basin irrigation system authority. But they are known to be unable to provide these services due to inadequate, human, financial, and technical resources [17]. Similar criticism applies to on-village operation of WUAs which are formally responsible for maintenance and operation of irrigation infrastructures

The aim of the research was to explore the everyday practices of the local women smallholders as their agriculture was being transformed toward sustainable practices. Fieldwork took place in Spring and Summer, 2011 in Khorezm province in Uzbekistan when the BMBF-UNESCO project was nearing its end. Ethnographic approach was selected for this study to capture and document the nuanced and complex nature of the everyday lives of the informants as immersed in social practices, institutional structures, and a local culture. Participant observations and in-depth interviews were used with individual women smallholders and members of their families. A total of 40 local women smallholders provided information in the in-depth interview and also allowed the researcher to conduct participant observations in their homes, fields, gardens, etc. All these women had kitchen gardens and tamorka where they cultivated

A total of nine key informant interviews were carried out with farm managers, representatives of WUA, and upper institutions of water management. Expert interviews were also carried out in Bonn, Germany, with the implementers of the BMBF-UNESCO project. Analysis of

and all of them had their male partners away from home in labor migration.

leeching of the fields, and extensive irrigation are fundamental necessities [18].

basin irrigation authority to the Water User Association (WUA) [19].

within their areas [17].

**5. Methodology**

institutional text was also used.

### **4. Local irrigation system**

The BMBF-UNESCO project was implemented in Khorezm province, 1 of the 12 provinces of Uzbekistan, which adjoins the environmental damaged Aral Sea and where about third of population lives below the poverty line of 1 USD per day [16]. Located 250 km south of the present shores of the Aral Sea, it covers 6800 km<sup>2</sup> of dry arid desert of which 270,000 hectares are used for irrigated agriculture [16]. The climate is arid with hot and dry summers and cold winters with precipitation of less than 100 mm per annum [16]. Irrigated agriculture is the mainstay of economy in the province accounting for about 67% of the total regional GDP [17]. Of 1.5 million of Khorezmian population, over 70% live in rural areas engaged in cotton, wheat, and rice production as private farmers or peasants [4]. Private farmers crop cotton, wheat, rice, and fodder maize [4]. Cotton occupies 50% of irrigated cropland and consumes about 40% of the total water supply of the region [4]. It contributes 16% to the GDP and earns almost all of the total export revenues of Khorezm province [4]. As explained above, the production of cotton and wheat follows the state procurement system, that is, the government enforces regulations on the acreage for each crop and production quantities to be submitted to the state at the fixed price, also determined by the state. In return, it ensures supply and delivery of water, diesel, fertilizers, and some other required inputs [4]. All this applies to private farmers only. Small holders cultivate potatoes, vegetables, fruits, as well as wheat and fodder [18]. They have garden plots around their houses typically about 0.12 ha and an additional plot of land of 0.13 ha called "tamorka" [18]. These tamorka plots comprise about 20% of the irrigated land of Khorezm and play significant role for the livelihoods of the households [18]. Crops in Khorezm are cultivated with a peculiar rural ecology due to high soil salinity annual leeching of the fields, and extensive irrigation are fundamental necessities [18].

Based on such a system of pre-determined production of strategic crops, irrigation management entities at national, regional, and local levels determine crop water requirements and develop delivery plans for each cropping season. Khorezm is located in the tail end of Amu Darya River and relies on upstream areas for water supply. Its irrigation infrastructure consists of about 5 km of water diverted from Amu Darya River through 16,000 km of irrigation channels [18]. During droughts, the water is reduced by 40% [18]. The arriving water is partly stored in a local Tuyamuyun water reservoir, and its volume is then rationed. Irrigation is a key factor for the fulfillment of production quotas. Quantity of water to be allocated is determined on the basis of the size of the irrigated areas, types of crops, and the irrigation norms determined by the state [6]. The allocation of water supply is carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources and passed on to basin irrigation system authority, to subbasin irrigation authority to the Water User Association (WUA) [19].

The technical delivery of irrigation water through maintaining and operating the irrigation and drainage network is the responsibility of the state water management organizations such as the Main Canal Management units of the sub-basin irrigation system authority. But they are known to be unable to provide these services due to inadequate, human, financial, and technical resources [17]. Similar criticism applies to on-village operation of WUAs which are formally responsible for maintenance and operation of irrigation infrastructures within their areas [17].
