Eelke P. Kraak
Summary
The government of Kyrgyzstan has embarked on an ambitious hydropower development programme on the transboundary Syr Darya River, which has provoked strong opposition from downstream Uzbekistan. The programme is driven by the alignment of actual energy concerns with interests of the national hydraulic elites and the global politics of project finance, which provides a logic for dams that may exacerbate existing geopolitical tensions across the region.
On the thirtieth of August 2010, then-president of the Kyrgyz Republic Roza Otunbayeva travelled to a sparsely inhabited stretch of the Naryn River to inaugurate the Kambarata-II dam and hydropower plant, amid much pomp and circumstance. It marked the completion of a project whose construction had begun during Soviet rule in the mid-1980s, but that had halted after independence in 1991 because of lack of funds. With an installed capacity of 200 MW, the Kambarata-II is the first in a series of 6-8 dams on the Naryn River that Kyrgyzstan’s national power utility plans to construct over the next decade. READ MORE
