Understanding the Role of Power in Changes to Pastoral Institutions in Kyrgyzstan

Our article reflects on the Kyrgyz experience of a transformation in pasture use and management, seeking to contribute to the literature on institutional change in post-socialist contexts. We employ the distributional theory of institutional change in order to understand gradual, informal de facto institutional change which emerged because of changes in formal institutions (laws) that changed the bargaining positions of actors involved. The study findings demonstrate the dynamics of change of interrelated formal institutions, power resources, informal institutions, and their distributional consequences. We observe that the enforcement of new pasture legislation introduced in 2009 gradually reducing bargaining asymmetry among actors, in the long run potentially favouring less powerful pasture users, who are herders providing herding services to their community. Evaluating the potential implications of formal institutional change for day-to-day pasture management and informal institutions, we expect changes to contribute to maintenance of pasture health in the medium to long term. However, traditionally powerful actors (individual herders) typically try to resist these changes and the shift to new informal institutions is therefore still highly contested.