Author(s): Alimardin Medetov
The issue of transboundary water resources management for Kazakhstan as country has a number of transboundary rivers coming from China, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and for sustainable and efficient water resources usage and management and also, in order to avoid conflicts and tensions, Kazakhstan has started to update the policy and the legal framework to align the water sector with the Integrated Water Resources Management concept and UN Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes. However, the legislative and institutional steps towards the implementation of this national and international framework are still ineffective and meet several obstacles. This paper evaluates legislative and institutional framework for transboundary water resources management in Kazakhstan based on a SWOT analysis (acronym which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). As a case study, this paper specifically focuses on Aral Sea transboundary river basin in Kazakhstan. The Aral Sea basin is a transboundary river basin, which geographically covers Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan; Iran with more of the rivers of this basin comes to Kazakhstan and Aral Sea, located on territory of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Before 1960, the Aral Sea ranked as the world’s fourth largest lake, after the Caspian Sea, the Great Lakes in North America and Lake Chad, since then it has been progressively drying up as result of ineffective resource management. The ultimate goal of this paper is to make sound conclusions, acting as a tool which may well facilitate a, badly needed, rational and integrated management of the entire transboundary surface river basins in Kazakhstan.