The Overexploitation of Natural Resources in Arid Central Asia. The Case of Hungry Steppe: Can a Collapse be a Solution?

Abstract

The paper aims to provide a postdictive answer to why Central Asia is continuously investing or aspiring to invest in irrigation infrastructure and further contributing to the overexploitation of renewable and non-renewable endowments of its steppe zones even when the conventional economic rationale loses its worth. The study devises its analytical framework around the Hungry Steppe case. The analyses explain such instances with the sunk-cost effect resulting from complexity investments as part of a positive feedback loop that eventually locked the Steppe in the intensive cropping system and land degradation. The paper justifies the discourse of the sunk cost role in the Hungry Steppe lock-in phenomenon using game modelling. The work presents two alternative scenarios based on its game-theoretic model. Both scenarios reveal that most strategic interactions between the State and resource users are subject to multiple equilibria under both bureaucratic and private arrangements. Though the private arrangement scenario expects better infrastructure, both keep locking the Steppe in the positive feedback loop of land degradation and intensive cropping. The paper provokes the discourse on alternatives to intensive cropping in the Steppe, suggesting the collapse of irrigated agricultural production practices to solve the vicious cycle of resource over-exploitation.

Keywords

• hungry-steppe
• investment
• irrigation
• infrastructure
• overexploitation
• sunk-cost effect
• collapse