OPEN GOVERNMENT IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

This dissertation asks why authoritarian regimes in Central Asia adopt the Open Government reform. This question is investigated by analyzing the 14 sub-cases from the Central Asian region that bring a new perspective on how authoritarian regimes adopt Western practices and manage citizen activism through an Open Government framework. Sixty-seven in-depth interviews with activists and state officials in Central Asia generate important themes and motivations that explain the adoption of open government reform in the region. The current scholarship focused on the Western countries and largely ignored the Post-Soviet countries. The present study is among the first to provide an in-depth analysis of Open Government and citizen engagement in the post-soviet Central Asian settings by investigating top-down and bottom-up forms of citizen engagement.

In Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the authorities pursued regime consolidation and external legitimization themes in their drive for open government reform. The National Council of Society Trust cases in Kazakhstan and the Virtual Reception in Uzbekistan showed that despite notable achievements in the introduction of open data and participation platforms, these authoritarian regimes ultimately did not become responsive to growing citizen activism. The Kazakh and Uzbek regimes actively engaged in networked authoritarianism and attempted to use the open government reform to promote government narrative and control non-state discourse. The case of Open Government Partnership in the Kyrgyz Republic revealed that the reform was driven by external legitimization and public services modernization themes. Ultimately, the state bodies failed to endorse the open government reform due to bureaucratic resistance and lack of political will. In Tajikistan, the regime aimed at regime consolidation while attempting to introduce open data and participation platforms. The short-lived open participation experiment with Mometavonem.TJ platform exemplified that the Tajik authorities sought regime consolidation in their Open Government adaptation, and they actively pursued networked authoritarianism while dealing with the growing citizen dissent in social media. The Turkmen Government engaged in the extreme case of networked authoritarianism while dealing with the COVID-19 pandemics.

This study contributes to the growing scholarship on Open Government in authoritarian countries showing why and how the regimes adopt the reform to secure their survival in the new information age. This work illuminates that Central Asian regimes pursue their own goals of networked authoritarianism and regime survival while adopting the Open Government. Essential insights and policy recommendations are generated to provide a roadmap for the proper Open Government reform in non-democratic settings. It will help both scholars and policy practitioners to promote transparency and accountability in the authoritarian world.