Introduction: Understanding Legal and Governance Reform in Central Asia

The prevailing assumption that a centrally planned system is inherently prone to chronic shortages and systemic wastefulness, whereas a market-based system ensures a more efficient allocation of resources, underpinned post-Communist economies’ strategic decisions to transition from central planning to market coordination (Kornai 2000; Rose 2001). The transformation process, which became popularly known as “transition,” attempted to build a modern society in which political decisions and social norms would be forged by democratic values, and economic relations would be determined by market forces. However, more than three decades of reform experience in Central Asian countries has shown that building an efficient market-based system—in which anonymous markets and impersonal bureaucratic organisations operate under the rule of law—was much more difficult than originally anticipated. Although the strength of market-based signalling and incentivising factors has intensified whilst bureaucratic organisations have become more established since the 1990s (Pomfret 2021), the latter still fail to operate impartially and according to the law.

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