Igor Rubinov

This article considers why residents of Tajikistan seek out development projects, which are increasingly focused on adaptation to climate change, even as they recognise the limitations of those projects. Experiences of meaningful development during the Soviet era, along with foreign media accounts and migrant experiences abroad, reoriented people’s expectations and encouraged them to seek aid. As a result, people sought out personal networks to guide development projects in the hopes of bolstering their ongoing livelihood strategies. Efforts to promote participation in development must account for the desires people hold in order to guide how projects are devised and implemented.

More money now flows into developing countries from the remittances of labor migrants than from official foreign aid. To make use of these crucial inflows, migrants situate remittances within transnational livelihoods strategies. While recent theories of transnational migration situate households prominently within these practices, ethnographic research in Kyrgyzstan reveals that households do not make use of remittances on their own. Transnational migration can work to secure individual needs, uphold communal reciprocities and lay the groundwork for community development by engaging a site of inter-household collaboration. These collaborations are formed out of communal practices that span households, connect urban and rural communities and maintain transnational links. This article seeks to bridge the development literature’s focus on transnational livelihoods embedded in households with an anthropological attunement to the social reciprocity of remittances. The resulting assemblages require constant upkeep while exposing social obligations to distortion and normative change.

Tajikistan has been the world’s most remittance-dependent economy for a decade. While migration processes have been well documented, their effects on ecological systems deserve greater scholarly and policy engagement. This paper considers the impact of wide-spread labor migration on land and forest resources. Changes to Tajikistan’s land tenure regime alongside relative stability after a lost decade of civil war and upheaval have created new opportunities for long-term ecological management. Despite a lack of experience and institutional support, Tajik households are beginning to invest in tree crops and expand woodlands. Migrants and sending communities are emerging as important drivers of land use and forest cover in Tajikistan.

What does adaptation to climate change entail? How do communities considered to be the “most vulnerable,” respond to environmental changes beyond their control? This dissertation explores the implementation of pilot climate adaptation projects by international development planners and their collaborators working in Tajikistan’s government and NGO sectors. My research brings to light the struggles, aspirations, and achievements of the people targeted by these projects.

Amidst the derelict industries and infrastructural ruins of the Soviet Union, a vast majority of Tajik men migrate to Russia to access higher wages through illicit work. Meanwhile, international aid organizations try (and often fail) to help Tajik communities respond to serious climatic changes: most acutely, shrinking glaciers providing less runoff for irrigation. I seek to understand how households stay rooted to a place that is ecologically and economically precarious. With so little help available from external entities, and so many working as migrants abroad, my informants labored to graft familial networks, social lives, and future imaginaries to local places. This dissertation explores the lived reality of climate adaptation as a twinned strategy of rooting and dispersal.

In tending to orchards, my informants endeavored to nurture scions: which can be understood as both branches of trees amenable to grafting and notable descendants of a family. Keeping households afloat in a precarious environment without government support required a reliance on what could be cultivated from the land. The scion’s dual nature highlights the interdependence of ecology and family in the mountainous regions of contemporary Central Asia. In building up this strategy over several turbulent post- Soviet decades, residents were able to accommodate new norms and agendas from NGOs and state agencies into adaptive transnational livelihoods. Families facing uncertainty transformed their relationship to the state, development institutions, and the environment through collaborative adaptation.