Path Dependencies of (Un-)sustainable Land Use in Central Asia

Across Central Asia, agricultural and agroforestry practices have been shaped by a high-modernist approach since about the 1950s, with the aim of overcoming ecological limitations. Negative repercussions of this approach still affect local developments, but a shift towards resource-conserving production systems faces constraints—many of which relate to so-called ‘path dependencies’, i.e. historically-evolved institutions constraining the current practices, policies and local imaginaries of (un-)sustainable land use in various ways. Drawing on case studies from agriculture and agroforestry developments in Xinjiang (China), Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, the paper explores these mechanisms and reveals a modernisation paradigm as a major source of path dependency. Moreover, the paper highlights aspects that are sometimes overlooked in the path dependency literature on Central Asia: first, path dependency should not be confused with Soviet legacies, and second, not all agricultural policies in the past were environmentally detrimental; in fact, reviving some aspects could actually be beneficial.