In Western legal institutions, the evolution of water rights seems to follow stages of management regimes from open access through communal control to exclusive use. This progression occurs as consumption increases in water-rich areas. While there is empirical and theoretical support for such a pattern, to date this observation has been made in western and well resourced contexts. Drs. Buck and Gleason hypothesize that an alternative regime of correlative use--that is, having some rights, but not absolute ones--develops where resources are scarce, experience with central authority strong, and public goods predominate. Their study tests this hypothesis in an arid region with Asian legal traditions: the Amu-Darya and Syr-Darya river basins of Soviet Central Asia. The research includes analysis of extant information on water rights in the central Asian republics of the USSR, in-depth interviews with water users and managers in these field locations, and primary data collection on legal, institutional, and environmental changes in the region. Studying the emergence of water rights arrangements in Soviet Central Asia can enhance our understanding of the meaning of property rights and resources in the context of global change. Also, there have been few efforts to use collective goods theory comparing the experience of communist and non-communist countries. The fact that the Soviet system is currently in tremendous flux in terms of legal, political, and economic transformations only adds to the importance of this project. The devolution of centralized authority in the Soviet Union and the uncertainty surrounding newly emerging governing arrangements make for a particularly timely and critical research focus.
