WATER SECURITY AND TRANSBOUNDARY COOPERATION IN CENTRAL ASIA

Water security has become one of the defining strategic concerns of Central Asia, a region where five states — Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan — depend on two shared river systems, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya, for irrigation, energy, and drinking water. Since independence, the inherited Soviet-era water-energy exchange scheme has gradually eroded, exposing the fragility of regional water governance and elevating water security to a matter of national and collective survival rather than mere resource management.