Common Pool Resources and the Transfer of Governance Technology: Water User Associations in Uzbekistan

Governments around the world are at- tempting to restructure the governance relationships between citizens and their country's policy-making institutions. The Sixth Global Forum on Reinventing Government has identified a set of "good governance" attributes to which governments should aspire, including transparency and participation. Uzbekistan is one country in which such an initiative has begun in the form of Water User Associations (WUA). As a case study of governance technology transfer, the research reported in this paper examines the impact of social capital and economic/social/political context on the WUAs' level of egalitarian decision making, level of accountability, and levels of participation and awareness. The paper concludes that social capital (in the form of occupational and generalized trust) and context (as strength of outside resources, strength of the surrounding economy, and level of diversity) lead to greater success in the successful transfer of governance technologies.