was” and “glossing over the varying degrees to which countries in the East are still, are no longer, or have never been postsocialist” (id. 541).

The merit of postsocialism as a concept is to have offered an alternative discursive and conceptual framing to transition and transitology, thereby inviting scholars to avoid aligning their empirical observations to determined trajectories of “transition” or “neoliberalisation”. However, Müller further notes, the concept has never achieved an emancipatory force as it is the case for the concepts of postcolonialism or postdevelopment. I suggest that the problem with postsocialism is that its prefix has been intended mainly temporally rather than ontologically like in *postcolonialism* or *postdevelopment*, where it marks the overcoming of, respectively, colonialism’s and development’s role as master-signifier. For postsocialism, instead, socialism remains the ontological reference as a “unifying experience” for a wide spectrum of diverse contexts. At the same time, however, at least since the end of socialist regimes in CEE and the FSU between 1989 and 1992,<fnref n="4" /> *capitalism* is the master signifier of meanings and identities of postsocialism, whereby socialism remains only capitalism’s (failed) Other.

The temporal prefix (“post-”) traps entire societies into the determinations of one specific past experience – societies that, in the last 30 years, have experienced complex historical processes, have followed diverse trajectories and are now looking to diverse futures. These determinations produce specific subject positions – of individuals but also of entire groups and territories – that are defined in the negative, as *lacking something*, as not being anymore (socialist) and not being yet (modern/capitalist). Like the subjects of development, defined by their lack of modernity (Gibson, Cahill, and McKay 2010; see also Gibson-Graham 2005; Escobar 1995), and the unemployed ex-workers in de-industrialising contexts, defined by their lack of wage labour (Gibson-Graham 2006b, 206–37), postsocialist subjects are defined in the negative by their lack of both socialism *and* capitalism/modernity, trapped until further notice in an interstitial space, in-between, unable to move and look forward (see also Müller 2018). Like the subjects of development and late capitalism, postsocialist subjects are thus charged with feelings of abandonment, frustration and failure.

In fact, I am more careful than Müller in declaring transitology’s lost influence today. Not only, as we have seen in Chapter 2, do essentialising and generalising narratives of “Soviet legacies” often underpin academic accounts at least concerning cooperation in ex-socialist countries; also, I have the impression, at least in the Central Asian contexts, the concept of transition – and the dichotomous, essentialising and hierarchical representations that come along it – is still very much present in both academic and public discourses. This is the case especially within the disciplines that are most influential for policy-making, in particular economics and political sciences. As a sign of this, consider that three decades after the fall of socialist regimes in CEE and the FSU, there are still academic institutes, study programmes and several conferences or publications that carry the term “transition” in their names or titles.<fnref n="5" />

<footnote n="4">⁴ It could be even argued, as Gibson-Graham (2006b) does when she denounces the capitalocentrism of Marxism, that socialism has always been capitalism’s Other.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ To give just a few examples among countless others, the “Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transition Economies” (IAMO) in Halle, Germany, is one of the most influential for agrarian policy-making in Central Asia. In 2016, IAMO jointly</footnote>
Müller (2019, 546) has made indeed an important and timely point in calling for a renewed epistemological project that “would be attuned to the plurality of forces that shape ex-socialist countries today, no longer referring back to socialism as the major reference point”, a project that “would not have sharp boundaries, but blurred, porous ones, not continuous”. I suggest that Gibson-Graham’s weak theory and diverse economies framework could provide a solid basis and inspiration for such a project. Applying Gibson-Graham’s reflections in this context would allow to acknowledge the diversity not only of experiences after socialism, but also of socialism itself. It would allow to retain us from the temptation to ascribe our observations to some grand narratives of “Soviet legacies” or of “transition” – as it is still too often the case today in both popular discourse and academic literature. In the project of a “postcapitalist postsocialism”, the prefix *post* would mark an ontological distancing from socialism *and* capitalism as master signifiers, thereby allowing to create discursive and affective space for acknowledging diverse experiences in the past, for thinking alternative in the future and for engaging in the present.

For instance, applying Gibson-Graham’s frameworks, Stenning et al. (2010, 227) showed that the neoliberal reforms promoted in Poland and Slovakia in the 1990s produced an expansion of alternative economic practices that “were inflected with a set of rationalities that extended beyond the narrowly neo-liberal” (see also Smith and Rochovská 2007). The expansion of these practices, they argued, reinforced “other-than-neo-liberal subjectivities” – an outcome opposite to the original aims of reforms (Stenning et al. 2010, 227). Similarly, Pavlovskaya (2004) mapped Moscow’s “diverse transitions” and showed the proliferation of diverse economic practices and their importance for household reproduction after the end of the Soviet Union. By reframing the ways they speak about transformation after socialism and naming and including the diverse economic practices this transformation produces, such analyses offer new modes of identification for postsocialist subjects and open spaces for hope and agency in the place of frustration and nostalgia.

## 4.3 Weak theory to rethink agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan

In their study of cooperation among ravens, van Dooren and Despret (2018) questioned how evolutionary biology – supported by the use of economic metaphors – has contributed to an understanding of (human and non-human) living beings as individuals are driven by one single motivation: their own survival in an evolutionary system where only the fittest can survive. The authors lament that, when observing a behaviour through the glasses of evolutionary biology, one can only see functions and motivations that correspond to an individualised quest for fitness. While noticing that this renders invisible other functions and motivations because they are considered impossible, van Dooren and Despret (id.) call for an approach based on a “logic of multiplication”, in which there is “a ‘cooperative’ relationship between

<footnote>organised with the International Association of Agricultural Economics (IAAE) a Symposium in Almaty titled “Agricultural transitions along the Silk Road: restructuring, resources and trade in the Central Asia Region”. Some influential economists of postsocialism teach the master programme in “Transition Management” at the Justus-Liebig University in Giessen, Germany. In December 2019, a radio broadcast dedicated to the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Ceausescu’s regime asks whether Romania’s transition has finished or is still ongoing today.</footnote>
hypotheses, highlighting the *many reasons* that ravens might do the things they do in particular contexts".
At the same time, they reject the use of an economic terminology that erases "an animal lifeworld – an
everyday experience of activity and leisure, pleasure and pain, abundance and hardship, exhilaration and
fear, rivalry and affection" (Crist 1999, 141–42, quoted in van Dooren and Despret 2018).

Chapter 2 explained how approaches by international actors to promote community-based cooperation and cooperatives are often based on a functionalistic understanding of cooperation and cooperatives as tools for economic and social development. In this sense, these approaches reproduce a perspective similar to the one criticised by van Dooren and Despret in evolutionary biology: a perspective that reduces human behaviour mainly to a quest for profit maximisation. The institutionalist approaches reviewed in Chapter 2 have attempted to complicate this understanding by tackling the complexity of human behaviour and by acknowledging its “bounded” rationality. Nonetheless, these approaches also tend to reproduce the assumption of profit maximisation as the main motor of human behaviour. With the narrow lenses of classical or institutionalist economics, authors are thus unable to explain or understand the limited participation in formal cooperation institutions and tend to generally blame some “psychological resistance to cooperation” inherited from the Soviet past. The application of such approaches and assumptions in postsocialist contexts therefore often leads to the conclusion that the failure of formal cooperation institutions is due to the legacies of previous socialist experiences, which trap communities in the determinism of path dependency. –

As discussed (§4.2.2), even the concept of postsocialism that emerged as a critique to the grand narratives of transitology bears the risk, today, of maintaining entire societies and territories in a state of in-betweeness and thus of producing a sense of lack and feelings of inadequacy, frustration and abandonment. I sense that such affects might be similar to the ones produced by the narratives that declare the failure of cooperatives and of formal cooperation in ex-socialist contexts in general and in Kyrgyzstan in particular. I presume that such affects might limit villagers’ possibilities for empowerment and self-determination within the framework of broader, formalised or unformalised, already existing cooperation practices. With this research, I thus aim to challenge such narratives and propose an anti-essentialist reading of cooperatives, cooperation and, more generally, of agricultural transformation in Kyrgyzstan. This reading should follow a “logic of multiplication” and produce more positive affects, of hope and possibility instead of frustration and abandonment. In the remainder of this chapter, I outline more in detail the conceptual basis (§4.3.1/2) and epistemological process (§4.3.3) for such an approach.

I apply Gibson-Graham’s weak theory to avoid the temptation of aligning my empirical observations to predictable trajectories (of neoliberalisation, of failure, of postsocialist path dependency for instance) and to remain instead open to the unpredictability and contingency of everyday practices of cooperation in my field site and propose an anti-essentialist re-reading of these practices. My approach is, first, *postcapitalist*, as defined in the former section, since it rejects capitalocentric assumptions and representations of the economy. It is, second, *postfantasmatic* insofar as it calls for traversing the fantasy that expects cooperatives to be bounded formal objects corresponding to the idealised models discussed in
Chapter 2. It is, third, *relational* since it considers cooperatives as overdetermined cooperation practices co-constituted through intimate everyday relations within more-than-human assemblages.

### 4.3.1 Traversing fantasies to engage with cooperatives

As mentioned in Chapter 2, some scholars have pointed to the “fantasmatic” attitude that very often underlies initiatives for the promotion of cooperatives both with an anti-capitalist transformative goal or as a tool for development within market economies (Byrne and Healy 2006; Gibson-Graham 2006a, 127–63). To counter such an attitude, these scholars have suggested to abandon an understanding of cooperatives as a formal and bounded object that is evaluated by comparing it with an idealised model in the future. Instead, they have proposed to look at cooperatives as a process of cooperation – specific, contingent, unpredictable – that takes place, with all its imperfections, in the present (see also Emery, Forney, and Wynne-Jones 2017).

Byrne and Healy (2006) base their analysis of fantasmatic attitudes towards cooperatives on Lacan’s concept of fantasy (see Lacan 1977). In Byrne and Healy’s reading of Lacan, fantasy originates from the “fundamental and unavoidable gap or lack in identity” that characterises subjects from the moment they break from the “prelinguistic, presubject wholeness” (*id*. 243). Fantasy is the mechanism through which subjects try to recreate the lost wholeness which will never come back. Fantasy creates at the same time the object of desire and the obstacle to its realisation: the “symptom”. Fantasmatic subjects are thus caught in the trap of desiring an object they can never have but, by producing the symptom as a scapegoat, they avoid confronting the inevitability of this lack.

Read from this perspective, co-operators, development practitioners and scholars engaging with cooperative initiatives project their desires onto a goal in the future: a cooperative system comprehending the whole society, Socialism, development or a perfect market. These goals represent objects of desire, however, and, instead of acknowledging their intrinsic impossibility, these subjects constitute different symptoms as scapegoats: the persistence and ubiquity of the capitalist system; interventionist governments limiting the self-fulfilment of the free market; corrupt and weak governments unable to implement the needed reforms for a conducive environment for cooperatives; or people’s cultural norms and habits not in line with the rationality of *homo economicus*, resulting for instance in a “resistance to cooperation” inherited from their Soviet experience.

Fantasmatic mechanisms bear a series of risks. Inspired by Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, even if not explicitly referring to the mechanisms of fantasy, Gibson-Graham (2006a, 103, 111) questions the “tradition of essentialist or structural (and thus largely negative) readings of cooperative experiments” that “constricts the ethical space of becoming, obscuring possibilities of (self)cultivation and the way that cooperative practice itself calls forth and constitutes its own subjects”. She warns against the hypercritic scrutiny that results from the comparison of actual cooperative experiences with utopian ideals and denounces that this attitude leaves scholars blind to the small achievements and struggles cooperatives and co-operators go through day by day (id. 102).
Byrne and Healy (2006), building on Gibson-Graham's reflections, note that fantasmatic attitudes in approaching cooperatives impose a rigid normative framework against which actual initiatives are judged. These attitudes nourish a purism that, besides limiting a deep engagement with the practical challenges of the everyday management of cooperatives, can also provoke fractions and sectarianism within the cooperative movement as well as within cooperatives. Therefore, Byrne and Healy warn:

> We are [...] concerned with what fantasy [...] prevents us from imagining, what possible politics and what other orientations of the desiring (economic) subject are precluded – how different approaches to economic, social and environmental justice are stymied by fantasies in which the world is already full of meaning, where the identity of (economic) subjects is anchored in relation to a frustrating symptom of which these subjects are unwilling to let go.

*(id. 245)*

How can subjects then overcome the mechanisms of fantasy and start imagining other futures, other possibilities? Always following Lacan, Byrne and Healy suggest that the point is not to abandon fantasies, but to traverse them (see also Healy 2010). This means to become aware that fantasies are *fantasies*, intrinsically unrealisable. Subjects who have traversed their fantasies become postfantasmatic subjects and ethical subjects: they are “capable of acting ethically” because they can assume responsibility for their own desires and actions, without externalising that responsibility onto others or onto symptoms (id. 502–3).

Laclau and Mouffe's (1985) "radical democracy" project similarly calls for acknowledging the nonfixity of identity and remaining in the lack in order to build a new understanding of democratic struggle (see also Gibson-Graham 2006a, 53–56; Byrne and Healy 2006). This is a struggle that does not aim "to fill the institutional authority or articulate the positive content of the law, but rather, to maintain the negativity that makes institutions and law changeable" (Byrne and Healy 2006, 246). For the realisation of this project, fantasies need to be traversed, since they "interfere with this negativity, fill up these spaces with a positive content that forecloses the possibility of struggle and the political" (ibid.). Following Gibson-Graham (2006a, 53–56), Byrne and Healy (Byrne and Healy 2006, 248) call for an extended project of "radical economic democracy". Contrary to Laclau and Mouffe's radical democracy, Byrne's and Healy's radical economic democracy acknowledges also the nonfixity of *the economy*: subjects can abandon the idea of the economy as a fixed and determined object and can embrace "structural indeterminacy" as "a vision that opens up the economy as a field of responsibility and decision" (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 103, drawing on Laclau 1995).

More concretely, Byrne and Healy (2006) tell how, in their vast experience of action research with cooperatives, they have encountered several subjects trapped in the mechanisms of fantasy, but also some postfantasmatic subjects. For the authors, the latter are co-operators who are capable of recognising "the fundamental negativity of identity [and thus] that the productive, appropriative or distributive processes of the firm are not given and may be transformed through struggle" (id. 252). They are ethical economic subjects, "open to democratic struggle and conflict, resolutely committed to producing a cooperative economy, and decidedly anti-utopian in their ethicopolitical commitments" (Healy 2010, 503). These co-operators can thus truly democratically and non-dogmatically discuss issues such as the distribution of
surplus, the remuneration of labour, or the inclusion of new members (see also the analysis of the
Mondragón Cooperative Corporation in Gibson-Graham 2006a, 101–26). In their endeavour to study
cooperatives, researchers need first of all to traverse their own fantasies if they aspire to see, analyse and
perhaps promote the commitment of postfantasmatic subjects and the processes of (radical) democratic
negotiation or to identify what prevents them (Healy 2010; also Byrne and Healy 2006, 244, note 2).

4.3.2 Cooperation as relational practice

In Chapter 2, I discussed how commoning scholars have questioned the assumptions of institutionalist approaches to the commons and have instead advanced an understanding of commoning as relational practice. These scholars invite an analysis of initiatives for the management of commons by focusing on how such initiatives reconfigure more-than-human relations. Such an analysis is based on a conceptualisation of institutions, identities and practices as bare of an essence and as co-constituted and co-emerging – or overdetermined. Therefore, institutions for the management of commons, or for community-based cooperation more generally (for instance cooperatives), are never fixed but always in becoming: they are negotiated, contested, experienced and practiced. They are not determined by specific structures of human behaviour or social norms, but they co-emerge with them. Human subjects (including their identities, rationalities and moralities) and social structures are also, like institutions, always contingent, co-constituted and in-becoming (Singh 2017; Nightingale 2019; also Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2016).

This co-emergence happens through everyday intimate practices, intended as the embodied performance
of affective practices that are always relational since they necessarily imply encounters with other human
and nonhuman entities (Singh 2013, 194 drawing on Raffles 2002). These intimate practices include of
course conscious decision-making based on economic calculations (as assumed by institutionalist
approaches), but also, for instance, the affective labour of taking care of a forest or a pasture or the
negotiation of rights and responsibilities over their use and care (Singh 2013; Gibson-Graham, Cameron,
and Healy 2016). Representations – as discursive practices – are part of these intimate practices and also
co-emerge in this process: discourse and knowledge are therefore always performative and co-constituted.

This approach rejects the assumption of full or bounded economic rationality as the main motor of
decision-making, but also the assumption of cognitive decision-making as the main motor of human
behaviour. Nightingale (2011) speaks of “irrational commons” not to imply that some decisions are not
rational, but to draw attention to alternative rationalities (based for instance on moralities of reciprocity,
affective attachments and emotional states) that indeed appear to be irrational to approaches valuing only
one type of economic rationality. Instead, human rationalities are multiple and based on understandings of
self and relational ethics that “emerge from certain ways of being with the world” (Singh 2017, 764).

From a relational perspective, humans are conceptualised “as ‘thinking-feeling’ empathetic beings”,
whose subjectivities emerge through intimate practices and affective socio-nature encounters (id. 752).
Senses of self, or identities, are never fixed nor stable, but are fluid and dynamic, so that “individuals at
time resist, collude, or otherwise inhabit contradictory subjectivities” (Nightingale 2013, 2374). Whereas
this approach recognises that subjects are produced through subjection processes entailing
governmentality practices and disciplining technologies, it also emphasises that these subjection
processes are never completely accomplished (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 23; Nightingale 2019).

Although Foucault recognised that the power emerging from governmentality practices of subjection can
be both “oppressive and limiting” or “productive and enabling” (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 23), it is rather
the expansion of his reflections by Judith Butler (1990; 1997) that has allowed to understand how the
“productive and enabling” aspect of power can lead to the emergence of new and different subjects. In
Gibson-Graham’s (2006a, 24) reading of Butler, subjection is a process of becoming that is always
ongoing and never completely accomplished, since “the exercise of power is temporalized, made up of a
continuous repetition and reiteration of ritualized practices that necessarily involve interruptions and
productive intervals of discontinuity”. It is in these intervals and discontinuities that subjects “may shift
and create new identities for themselves despite the seemingly hegemonic power of dominant discourses
and governmental practices” (ibid.). It is also in these same intervals and discontinuities that commoning
scholars, including Gibson-Graham, aim to lever to cultivate new kinds of subjects.

An essence is thus negated to identities. As a consequence, communities are not constituted around a pre-
given essence or natural belonging. An approach to commons as “an active political relationship, rather
than some assumed common inheritance, natural or historical” (Amin and Howell 2016, 10), necessarily
implies “inessential” communities (Gibson-Graham 2006a, 88 drawing on Agamben 1993). Commoning
practices constitute communities – referred to as “commoning-communities” in Gibson-Graham,
Cameron, and Healy (2016) – with boundaries that are always contingent, fluid and transformable.
Importantly, commoning scholars, assuming a “relational-vitalist ontology” (Vasile 2019a) inspired by
posthumanism and vital materialism, insist that “the commoning-community is more-than-human” in that
commoning practices always imply relations between humans and non-humans (Singh 2017). Commons
are thus “a set of more-than-human, contingent relations-in-the-making that result in collective practices
of production, exchange and living in the world” (Nightingale 2019, 18).

It is thus important to avoid the temptation of falling in known patterns of identification with “essential”
communities but also with particular regimes of property. In this sense, a postcapitalist politics of
commoning is decoupled from “formal legal struggles against the enclosure of commons through
privatisation or commodification” (although these struggles remains important), but rather “attends to the
diversity of practices for commoning different types of property” (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy
2016, 198; also Clement et al. 2019; Sato and Alarcón 2019). This decoupling allows eventually

a transformative politics not located in an elusive future, not in a combative anti-
privatisation struggle focused narrowly on property rights; instead it would be a
postcapitalist and posthuman politics located in the shared present – in the becoming of a
commoning-community in the here and now. (Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2016,
207)
Amin and Howell (2016, 2, 5) agree that such an approach allows us to see what is already happening and thus to “nurture and expand the politics of possibilities”, instead of waiting for anti-capitalist alternatives that never arrive. They salute that understandings of inessential commoning-communities allow us to abandon “a nostalgia for community as the antidote of neoliberal individualism” (id. 10) – a nostalgia that often underlies development programmes. However, they also rightly warn that “there is, at the very least, nothing *inherently* progressive in the political use of the commons” (id. 5). Similarly, Nightingale (2019, 18) reminds us that communities emerging from commoning processes are always “contingent achievements, never free from the ambivalence and contradictions of power”. As such, they can forge new relations and include new entities but can also reconfigure such relations by cutting other entities out; they continuously create inclusions *and* exclusions. Since we cannot avoid these ambivalences, Nightingale (id. 31, drawing on Haraway 2016) concludes that we should practice “staying with the trouble, keeping in view the exclusions, others, and power over that commoning practices create”.

More generally (and beyond commoning), insisting on the ontological importance of acknowledging the diversity of economies does not entail naively assuming that all forms of noncapitalist practices are progressive. On the contrary: a diverse economies analysis as outlined above makes visible economic practices that often remain hidden in capitalocentric analyses and therefore exposes these practices to evaluation against ethical criteria – for instance by revealing the inequalities and discriminations produced through these practices. Gibson-Graham’s framework allows to identify communality and solidarity as well as exploitation in economic spaces (such as the household) that are often overseen by traditional analyses (see Gibson-Graham 2006b, 265). This framework allows, for instance, Smith and Stenning (2006) to show how the diverse economies of postsocialism (including remittances, black markets or care work) constitute at the same time exploitative as well as empowering relations.

Geographers have been particularly well positioned to contribute to the development of such theoretical reflections in that they have brought a special attention and a more precise theorisation of space, scale and materiality within the investigation of commoning practices (see e.g. Nightingale 2013; Gibson-Graham, Cameron, and Healy 2016; Amin and Howell 2016; Singh 2017). They have emphasised that practices of commoning or, more generally, of cooperation, are always localised – they happen in particular *places*, which in their turn emerge through the embodied affective experience of engaging in such practices (Singh 2017). These practices are also always embedded in a multi-scalar context – from the macroeconomic structures of, for instance, neoliberal polices and global environmental processes to the materiality of embodied emotions and bodily experiences of everyday practices (see Clement et al. 2019, 6).
4.3.3 Rethinking cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan

In order to rethink cooperatives as the result of relational practices of cooperation in Kyrgyzstan from a postcapitalist postfantasmatic perspective, I will follow the conceptual steps<fnref n="6" /> that Gibson-Graham (2006b; 2006a) has applied for her project of rethinking the economy. We have seen that cooperatives are usually understood as a particular type of enterprise that follows specific principles and values (Chapter 2). I depart from such a narrow understanding of cooperatives as formal institutions and look instead at the diverse practices that emerge around, and sometimes converge into, the idea of cooperative. These practices are sometimes based on principles of solidarity and altruism and other times on the maximisation of individual profit; however, they are always part of relational processes of being in-common and thus always entail also affective attachments, bodily encounters and discursive representations.

First, I will *deconstruct* both the idea of cooperatives as formal bounded objects and their insertion within specific teleologies of development or postsocialist transition. I will analyse attempts to promote cooperatives not as part of a coherent and unitary ideological or political project, but rather as contingent and localised practices that individual actors negotiate and reinterpret in their everyday. I will analyse how the narrative of the failure of cooperatives is constructed in the specific context of contemporary Kyrgyzstan, how this narrative produces particular affects and their consequences for villagers' subjectivities and everyday lives. At the same time, the operation of deconstruction concerns also my own fantasies about cooperatives as an alternative to capitalist modes of production and to neoliberalisation processes.

Second, looking at the cooperative as a fluid entanglement of diverse practices will allow a *re-reading* of cooperation experiences in rural Kyrgyzstan. In particular, I will be able to grasp and analyse the diversity of such practices (e.g. formal or informal, punctual or repeated, spontaneous or imposed, old or new) and how they are inserted in broader local diverse economies. Conceptualising cooperatives as emerging from relational practices also allows me to analyse their promotion as one element (among others) of the continuous reconfiguration of social relations through everyday practices.

The final step would be to engage in a *creative exploration* of the ways in which some particular subjectivities might be nurtured through specific cooperation practices. For the reasons I explain in the next chapter, however, I pursue a less ambitious project within the scope of my doctoral dissertation: I will explore how we – as scholars – can modify the way we frame and (if we) speak about the failure of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan in order to nurture more positive affects.

<footnote n="6">⁶ Note that these steps do not correspond to the order of the chapters in Parts III and IV. Rather, they are part of the methodological strategy I apply iteratively within the single chapters and sections of the manuscript.</footnote>
5 ENGAGING WITH COOPERATIVES: METHODOLOGICAL APPROACH

In his contribution to the symposium in memory of Julie Graham, DeMartino (2013, 491) provides an eloquent synthesis of the methodological implications of Gibson-Graham’s reflections:

> Meeting the Gibson-Graham challenge to see the world differently, without recourse to sutured ontologies that discipline, direct, and constrain, requires of the academic a difficult adjustment in affect that many cannot countenance. It calls on us to challenge the supposed academic virtues of detachment, discernment, and critique [...]. We are challenged [...] to take the risk of laying ourselves bare – apprehending the world with the naïveté of the unscholarly rather than with an attitude of already knowing.

The weak theory approach outlined in the former chapter indeed requires from researchers to abandon the usual categories and “strong theories” with which we are used to make sense of the world we observe. This means committing to an epistemological openness that allows us to resist the temptation to trace what we observe back to known categories and predictable processes. It would be naïve, however, to think that we can lay ourselves *completely* bare of them; instead, we are called to make an effort to become aware of, and critically scrutinise, the structures that already – and often unconsciously – frame our ways of thinking and reading the world (see Gibson-Graham 2014, 148).

A performative ontology as outlined in the previous chapter, on the one hand, acknowledges that, in an overdetermined world, knowledge is always situated, contingent and partial; that – like subjects, institutions, or power structures – knowledge emerges in a specific context not only through discursive practices but, more broadly, through intimate practices that are always affective and relational. On the other hand, performative ontology also acknowledges that knowledge is at the same time performative – it is constitutive of such practices – and invites us therefore to assume the responsibility we bear as producers of knowledge that are legitimised by a particular institutional context. The idea of an “active transformative subject ‘learning about’ a separate inert object” is abandoned in favour of a “subject-object that is a ‘becoming world’” (Gibson-Graham 2011, 4).

Learning, then, means first of all a transformation of the researching subject: this is “not learning in the sense of increasing a store of knowledge but in the sense of becoming other, creating connections and encountering possibilities that render us newly constituted beings in a newly constituted world” (Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010a, 322; see also Gibson-Graham 2006a, 127–64; 2008; DeMartino 2013, 492). This means also that data are not “collected”, but rather co-produced and constructed in a specific situated context (see also Rose 1993; 1997) and that “the field is not a site where we recognize or particularize what we already know, but a place where we create the new” (Gibson-Graham 2008, 625). In this sense, as advanced by feminist scholars already in the 1980s, the field itself as a place, the researcher as a subject, as well as data or knowledge, all co-emerge in an always situated, contingent and transitory way through relations, encounters and practices (e.g. Harding 1987; Haraway 1988).

Reflexive ethnography, as a way for “researching selves and others” (Davies 1999), is particularly well suited for an intellectual endeavour as the one proposed in the previous chapter (see Gibson-Graham
2014). Ethnography as a methodological approach commits to an in-depth engagement with other lifeworlds: it focuses on how the object it studies is constituted in the everyday of people's lives (e.g. Crang and Cook 2007). Reflexive ethnography expands this approach by including the researching subject, and her own lifeworld, in the analysis, thereby collapsing the difference between research subjects and objects (e.g. Davies 1999; Foley 2002; Alsop 2005). Ethnography as a methodological approach is necessarily iterative-inductive. It requires to be open to the unexpected of the field, to reveal local structures of meaning, instead of projecting external structures on the local reality to make sense of it. The researcher is thus invited to adopt a flexible attitude to fieldwork and research – a flexibility that allows the researcher to integrate the unexpected and to creatively modify the research plan, approach and categories in accordance with the evolution of observations and reflections.

Reflexive ethnography is also necessarily feminist, since it de-centres the site of knowledge production and embraces an understanding of knowledge as always situated and contextual (e.g. Rose 1993). A feminist methodology also implies a particular attention to the materiality of the research process (e.g. Stodulka, Dinkelaker, and Thajib 2019). This includes a focus on the body (of the researcher and of others) “as a social, political and economic location” and thus “as a site of material inequality” (Noxolo 2009, 63, 61); but also a focus on the body as the “sensory agent” (id. 63) through which we experience inequalities and, more generally, social processes – a “sensory agent” whose affects, feelings and sensations need to be part of analysis (see also Ahmed 2007; Laliberté and Schurr 2016; Militz, Faria, and Schurr 2019).

For my study of agricultural cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan I thus apply a case-study approach (see e.g. Gomm, Hammersley, and Foster 2000; Yin 2003) inscribed within a feminist/reflexive ethnography methodology. A case-study approach allows a long-term engagement in and with a specific subject/object or place, which is crucial for my endeavour to apply weak theory to postsocialism. Within my broader theoretical approach, the limited statistical generalisability of case-study findings is not a major concern, since the objective of weak theory is precisely to avoid generalising “small facts” into broad categories but, on the opposite, to be committed to the diversity of each field. Still, my aim is to produce an analysis that is relevant also beyond my specific case study: indeed, a case-study approach of the kind outlined allows for analytic generalisations, intended as the possibility to “expand and generalize theories” beyond the single case study (Yin 2003, 10).

If we acknowledge that knowledge is always situated and that the field is co-constituted through research practice, reflecting on the genealogy of a research project becomes inescapable. Before turning to the more traditional elements of a methodology chapter (§4.2), I therefore briefly describe the evolution of my reflections, decisions and actions since the beginning of my doctoral project (§4.1). Certainly, this description cannot account for all the ups and downs, ebbs and flows, moments of enthusiasm and frustration, second thoughts and changes of mind that make up a doctoral research project or research in general. Yet writing about them in retrospective allows me to ascribe to events and decisions a certain (even if always partial) coherence that was not consciously perceived in the moment these events and decisions happened. This outline is intended only to give a general overview of how my research project
evolved and of my positionality within it. Committing to a reflexive ethnography, however, means that
such reflections are not relegated to a methodological section; instead, they will be integral part of
analysis. Therefore, the reader will find more details about, among other things, field access difficulties,
translation challenges and “going native” in the analytical chapters.

**5.1 Genealogy of the research**

This research project has developed over the last six years, starting when I joined the Human Geography Unit at the University of Fribourg as a research and teaching assistant in November 2013.<fnref n="1" /> Before, I had obtained a master’s degree in geography at the University of Zurich with a thesis on the implementation of participatory tools in international development projects in rural Nepal (see Cima 2013; 2015). The research in Nepal was part of an applied research project<fnref n="2" /> initiated and funded by a Swiss NGO, by which I was then employed as an intern after obtaining my degree. At the University of Fribourg, Christine Bichsel, a professor working on Central Asia would become my future supervisor. When I joined her group, I had no previous knowledge of the Central Asian region, but I carried a baggage of theoretical reflections as well as ethical and practical questions about the design and implementation of development programmes. This background revealed crucial for the evolution of my doctoral research: although initially determined to shift my research focus away from development questions, these questions, and the conceptual framings developed during my previous academic and professional engagements, strongly shaped the way I started looking at the new regional context and influenced what I was able – and unable – to see during the first reviews of literature and the first visits to Kyrgyzstan.

My doctoral research was not part of a broader research project, which had advantages and disadvantages.
On the one hand, I had ample freedom to develop my own research foci and ideas; on the other, this
freedom was often difficult to deal with, especially at the beginning, when I had to develop a research
idea in a regional context I barely knew. The choice to work specifically on Kyrgyzstan was then mainly
pragmatic. In comparison with the other Central Asian republics, Kyrgyzstan has the most open visa
regime and the least authoritarian government. This means, for a young researcher without experience in
the region, more freedom and ease to explore the context without a clear research design in mind and a
limited risk of naïve *faux pas* putting other people and myself in danger.

I visited Kyrgyzstan for the first time in summer 2014 (see Tables 5.1 and 5.2) with a vague idea to focus
my research on memory processes in relation to land issues, since memory is highly politicised within
nation-building processes (see Umetbaeva 2015; Isaacs and Polese 2016). During this first stay, I visited
six of the seven provinces of Kyrgyzstan, exploring possibilities for my future fieldwork.<fnref n="3" /> Through a

<footnote n="1">¹ The position was financed for five years by the university. Fieldwork costs were covered in part by my supervisor's personal research fund and in part by the *Fonds de recherche du Centenaire de l'Université de Fribourg*. My acknowledgments go to both.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² See https://www.ids.ac.uk/projects/accountability-at-local-level-in-fragile-contexts/ (accessed 26.08.2019).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ With “fieldwork”, I mean the research work taking place during my stays in Kyrgyzstan. However, as this chapter shows, I do not assume an epistemological divide between this narrow definition of fieldwork and the rest of the research process. For a critical discussion of the concept of field see Amit (2000).</footnote>
fortuitous chain of contacts, I could visit Oktjabr, an ex-state-farm-turned-cooperative near Karakol, the capital of the Issyk-Kul province. This particular encounter stimulated my imagination about a last bastion of resistance against the penetration and expansion of capitalism in rural Kyrgyzstan after the end of the Soviet Union.<fnref n="4" /> Once back in Switzerland, I thus decided to focus my research on the memory of collective work in the framework of ex-Soviet farms transformed into agricultural cooperatives in order to understand how such memory is constructed through everyday practices of collective work.

<table><caption>Table 5.1: Research timeline<fnref n="5" /></caption><tr><td colspan="2">2013</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Getting acquainted with the regional context</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2014</td></tr><tr><td>Winter-spring</td><td>General literature review on Central Asia</td></tr><tr><td>Summer</td><td>2 months' exploratory stay in Kyrgyzstan</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Elaboration of the research concept</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2015</td></tr><tr><td>Winter-spring</td><td>Thematic literature reviews, preparation of fieldwork</td></tr><tr><td>Summer</td><td>3 months' exploratory stay in the Issyk-Kul province</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Data analysis</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2016</td></tr><tr><td>Winter</td><td>Specification of the research concept, preparation of fieldwork</td></tr><tr><td>Spring-summer</td><td>IAMO-IIAE Symposium, Almaty<br>6 months' research stay in Kyrgyzstan</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Theoretical framework (Gibson-Graham)</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2017</td></tr><tr><td>Winter</td><td>Data analysis</td></tr><tr><td>Spring</td><td>AAG Annual Conference, Boston<br>Theoretical framework, preparation of last fieldwork</td></tr><tr><td>Summer</td><td>2 months' research stay in Kyrgyzstan</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Data analysis</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2018</td></tr><tr><td>Winter</td><td>Summer school "Researching post-capitalist possibilities", Paramatta<br>Clarification of theoretical framework</td></tr><tr><td>Spring</td><td>Data analysis</td></tr><tr><td>Summer</td><td>POLLEN Bi-annual Conference, Oslo<br>Clarification of theoretical framework</td></tr><tr><td>Autumn</td><td>Data analysis</td></tr><tr><td colspan="2">2019</td></tr><tr><td>Whole year</td><td>Writing the thesis manuscript</td></tr></table>

Before going back to Kyrgyzstan in summer 2015, I thus focused my desk work on the exploration of regional experiences with cooperatives and on more general conceptualisations of cooperatives in academic literature. While engaging with this literature, my normative position towards it was influenced by my fantasy of cooperatives as a form of resistance and as an alternative to capitalist modes of production – nurtured in my imagination by the examples of South American *empresas recuperadas*.<fnref n="6" /> With my background in critical development studies, I remained suspicious of attempts to promote cooperative organisation through international development programmes as well as of economic literature

<footnote n="4">⁴ This formulation is of course caricatural: see Chapter 6 for a more nuanced analysis of these fantasies.</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ I only include here the main milestones of the research process and the conferences/workshops that most influenced my reflections. For a detailed timeline of research stays in Kyrgyzstan see Table 5.2. Certainly, the research process is much more messy, unpredictable and aleatory than both Table 5.1 and 5.2 can show.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See e.g. http://mner.com.ar/wordpress/ (accessed 01.10.2020).</footnote>
promoting them as a solution to the problems of the free market. Having spent already a few months in
Kyrgyzstan, where I experienced the extraordinary hospitality of its people as well as the strong
reciprocity ties among relatives and friends, I was surprised – and sceptical – of finding in most literature
on cooperatives and cooperation in the region the conclusion that, in short, Central Asian people today are
not very prone to cooperate in economic activities. This was also the main take-home message on
cooperation at the symposium of agricultural economists to which I participated in spring 2016 in
Almaty. The narrative of the failure of cooperatives and cooperation in all of Central Asia and the
identification of the causes of such failure in some sort of “Soviet legacy” hovered about the whole
symposium.

My next stay in Kyrgyzstan in summer 2015, however, seemed to confirm the message of the symposium, which provoked in me feelings of frustration and disillusion. It revealed impossible to conduct my research with Oktjabr; what I had planned to be my first fieldwork in my restricted “field” transformed thus in a second explorative fieldwork in the Issyk-Kul province, searching for a cooperative to work with. The exploration of several cooperatives seemed to confirm that cooperatives in the region had failed: in the best case, they existed only on paper; in the worst, nobody seemed to know about them. This reading was also confirmed in my meetings with development practitioners in Bishkek. The decision to settle down in Pjak for the rest of my fieldwork in 2016 and 2017 and to maintain Ak-Bulut as my single case study was therefore not due to its success as a cooperative, but rather as its representativity of “failed cooperatives” in the country. In the meantime, the encounter with cooperatives more recent than Oktjabr that had been created in the 2000s with the support of international development programmes brought back the relevance of the topic of development and of questions related to the role of international actors in the promotion of a particular model of cooperative for my research.

The decision to work on memory practices with a cooperative that existed almost only on paper revealed
difficult to implement in practice, however. I realised this only after the first two months of my long
fieldwork in Pjak in 2016. While trying to identify some sort of collective activities in the village as entry
points for the investigation of memory practice, I gradually built the conviction that the market had taken
over everything and that no (or very few) collective practices remained to observe: villagers confirmed
this impression by lamenting the monetisation and/or loss of traditional social rituals and solidarity
practices. My interest at this point became to understand how this “marketisation” had happened.

I had already heard about Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies, in particular through their application in ex-socialist contexts by Smith and Stenning (2006). While observing current agricultural practices in the village, indeed, I felt that the categories I was using to frame them as “capitalist” or others were not helping me making sense of them; rather, they were producing a further sense of frustration in facing the powerful “market forces” that were taking over even social life in the village.<fnref n="7" /> Once back in Switzerland in autumn 2016, I thus engaged deeply with Gibson-Graham’s work, which would radically change my

<footnote n="7">⁷ Again, I am providing a caricatural account of the feelings I experienced. This is similar to Gibson-Graham's (2006b, 9, note 19 drawing on Foucault 1973) strategy of denaturalisation, "where 'orders' or classifications are made to appear strange or ridiculous".</footnote>
perspective on my research and on research in general. I was further inspired by the encounter with Neera Singh and the vitalist-relational commoning scholarship at the annual conference of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) in Boston in summer 2017. The privilege – in terms of time and resources available – of working at a Swiss university allowed me to pursue the engagement with these theories not only through readings but also through personal encounters, in particular at the summer school “Researching Post-capitalist Possibilities” organised by Katherine Gibson and Stephen Healy in (Southern) summer 2018 and at a feminist political ecology panel at the bi-annual conference of the Political Ecology Network (POLLEN) in Oslo in (Northern) summer 2018.

These theoretical inspirations, in parallel with the engagement with my empirical data, have helped me in
making better sense of the affective and intellectual experiences I lived during my stays in Kyrgyzstan –
and that I am also continuously living throughout the research process until the present moment. In
particular, Gibson-Graham's work has helped me to abandon the narrow categories on which both
agricultural economists or development workers and anti-capitalist cooperative supporters commonly
rely. Abandoning these categories has meant to be better able to value the diversity of economic practices
that make up agriculture in Pjak and to evaluate them more precisely according to the ethical principles I
decide to apply. Thus, in the last short fieldwork in 2017, I was not trying anymore to see how market had
taken over everything; rather, I was looking at how market had *not* taken over everything and how also
“market” was a contingent and incomplete entity. I focused thus on the identification and investigation of
the diverse economies of the village and how a cooperative (whose “failed” status suddenly made less
sense) was inserted in them. Questions of memory and the relation to past practices and ideas of
collective work lost their centrality in my work; nevertheless, they remain one of the numerous aspects to
consider in the analysis of diverse economies practices.

As this brief overview has shown, my research process (as all research) is far from being linear,
predictable and coherent but is rather a continuous open-ended iterative process between the various parts
of a research design – a process that is influenced by the researcher’s emotions and affects, normative
positions, fortuitous encounters, empirical and theoretical inspirations, as well as material limits and
possibilities. It is a continuous back-and-forth from theory to empirical experience and from empirical
experience to theory, mediated also by conscious and unconscious affective dispositions. As I have
explained here, the conceptual framing through weak theory, diverse economies and commoning
approaches emerged quite late in my research – actually after I had already completed most of the
fieldwork. Also for this reason, one of the main limitations of my application of Gibson-Graham’s
framework is the lack of her third step: the active political step of *constructing* alternative practices and
feelings with and within a hybrid community through action-research practices (see Chapter 4). My
political contribution to the field I have engaged with over the last six years is therefore less ambitious: it
is about providing an alternative way for speaking of rural transformation and the promotion of
cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan, hoping that this can contribute to nurture more positive affects than the sense
of frustration and disillusionment in front of the “failure” of cooperatives in the region.<fnref n="8" />

## 5.2 Constructing a case study and approaching the field

In the former section, I showed that the research is not a linear and coherent process; on the contrary, the evolution of a research project is shaped by hazard, fortuitous events, casual encounters and the unpredictable trajectories of relations and materialities. My choice to work in Kyrgyzstan was mostly due to the pragmatic factors discussed above. The decision to focus on the Issyk-Kul region was determined by the encounter with Oktjabr cooperative in 2014. When Oktjabr refused to work with me in 2015, I had already settled in Karakol and could count on a relatively good network of people there. From that position, it was easier to find other cooperatives in the surroundings than to extend my search beyond the Issyk-Kul. Finally, also the choice of the cooperative Ak-Bulut in Pjak was largely due to pragmatic reasons: the difficulties in accessing the other cooperatives I had visited, on the one hand, and the openness and hospitality of Ak-Bulut's chairman's family on the other.<fnref n="9" />

This fortuitousness, however, does not mean that the choices and decisions that shaped the research process were random. Certainly, they were also informed by my theoretical and methodological reflections. In this section, I explain in retrospective the epistemological rationales to focus my work on Kyrgyzstan, the Issyk-Kul region and the Ak-Bulut in Pjak and to work, in these specific places, on specific topics. Because my research is iterative-inductive, the question is not only why a particular place is suited to study a given topic, but also the other way around: what topics are relevant to be studied in a particular place?

### 5.2.1 Studying cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan

As anticipated in the Introduction and as detailed in Chapter 3, Kyrgyzstan is a well-suited context to delve into the complex debates on cooperation. The importance of cooperation has been a topic of concern for Kyrgyzstan's agricultural sector in the context of decollectivisation after independence. At the same time, the country's quick opening to international cooperation and to democratic governance mechanisms has attracted numerous international programmes promoting cooperation in the agricultural and other sectors. The peculiar characteristics of contemporary Kyrgyzstan have made the country a perfect laboratory for international agencies to experiment with increasingly popular approaches of community-led development, including the promotion of community-based management and cooperatives. In these experiments, projects have often mobilised the reference to pre-Soviet Kyrgyz

<footnote n="8">⁸ I plan a visit to Kyrgyzstan once I have finalised my doctoral degree, during which I will organise workshops and bilateral meetings with development and governmental actors to present and discuss my reflections. I also plan to engage in conversations with my main collaborators and friends in the village with the same aim. For restitution as a way to increase scientific rigour see Lincoln and Guba (1985).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ I will discuss these issues in detail in Chapter 7.</footnote>
traditions of cooperation. On the other hand, as we have seen, scholars and practitioners lament the scarce
effectiveness of such initiatives in the country and point to the persistence of Soviet habits that limit their
success. It becomes then relevant to investigate the ways in which the models of cooperation promoted by
projects are translated at the local level, but also to reveal the implications of different representations of
past and present cooperation and of different definitions of success and failure for the actual practices of
cooperation in Kyrgyzstan's agricultural sector.

5.2.2 Studying cooperatives in the Issyk-Kul region

The climate and accessibility of the Issyk-Kul region (see Fig. 2, also Chapter 7) provide favourable conditions for farming; the region is one of the most russified in Kyrgyzstan and where the tradition of Soviet collective farming is most rooted. This context could be considered favourable for cooperatives: it has indeed attracted numerous rural development programmes and maintains today the highest number of registered cooperatives in the country (Ministry of Agriculture, personal communication, 30.06.2017). At the same time, my explorations in the region seemed to confirm the idea that, also here, cooperatives are rarely successful. It is therefore all the more relevant to study the “failure” of cooperatives (or at least the construction of failure) in a region that, in principle, seems to provide favourable conditions for both farming and cooperation.

**5.2.3 Studying cooperatives in Pjak**

When I first decided to settle down in Pjak in 2015, I thought that the cooperative Ak-Bulut was an
example of a quite successful cooperative of the “new generation”, i.e. of those service cooperatives
promoted especially in the 2000s by international agencies in the framework of their rural development
programmes. Since access to ex-Soviet farms that had turned into cooperatives was precluded to me, Ak-
Bulut seemed a good substitute. According to its chairman’s explanations during our first meetings, Ak-
Bulut’s members met regularly, bought products in bulk together and marketed their produce collectively.
The cooperative fulfilled thus my requirement of having some collective activities that were taking place
materially in concrete locations, which would allow me to easily meet members and observe their
practices.

When I later found out that these concrete practices and locations were in fact almost nonexistent, I
nevertheless decided to keep Ak-Bulut as my case study. What, then, revealed more relevant were
questions about the “failure” of this cooperative and especially about the representations and definitions
of such failure – by members, villagers and development practitioners. In this sense, I now consider Ak-
Bulut an example of what is commonly seen as a “failed cooperative” – one of those cooperatives that
exist only on paper and for whose failure scholars usually mobilise the idea of some sorts of Soviet legacy
determining a “psychological resistance” to cooperation (e.g. Gardner and Lerman 2006, 5). Even if I
acknowledge the peculiarities of Ak-Bulut as a unique experience in a specific place and time, I maintain
that the cooperative is a good example among the three fourths of the registered cooperatives in
Kyrgyzstan that are considered “fictive” because they do not carry out collective activities in their formal
framework (Lerman and Sedik 2017, 236–37, see Chapter 6).

5.2.4 The researching subject as part of the field

***The researcher's multiple identities in the field***

I settled down in Pjak in August 2015, where I was hosted by Kumbat (Ak-Bulut's chairman) and his family in their house. Kumbat became my referent person in the village. This provided several advantages, but also some challenges. As Ak-Bulut's chairman, Kumbat was key to introducing me to its members, activities and history. As an influential person in the village, former chief agronomist in the local Soviet farm and later land specialist of the local administration, he was also my main reference to identify and be introduced to important people in the village and its surroundings, as well as a crucial source of knowledge about the history of the village, its institutional organisation, agricultural practices and political and social structures. Having settled down in his house, I quickly became known in the village as Kumbat's "Swiss daughter". This guaranteed me a warm welcome among his friends.

On the other hand, I am well aware that my position as “Kumbat’s daughter” made more difficult my approach to people who were less befriended with Kumbat. The network of contacts I built during my stays in Pjak has been strongly shaped by Kumbat’s own networks; I had to actively search for contacts outside his networks and it was not always easy to overcome their initial suspicious attitude provoked by my strong link with Kumbat. At the same time, Kumbat’s influence in the village probably shaped in a specific direction the way some of his friends talked to me.

Being a young female foreigner in the village, in comparison to other identity positions, was usually advantageous to my relations with villagers and their readiness to speak with me. Middle-aged to old men were often flattered to speak with a young female foreigner and were usually courteous – although I sometimes felt taken a bit less seriously than men or older women. Women were in general prone to chat with me; older women often assumed a caring motherly attitude towards me, which, of course, sometimes felt disempowering. As a general rule, in the case several household members were present at an interview or a chat with me, older members (if not too old) would interact more actively with me than younger ones, and men would interact more actively than women. It was therefore difficult to relate to young women (especially if married and living in their in-laws’ house) and to young married men, whose contact with a young unmarried woman was probably judged as inappropriate. There were of course several exceptions to this general rule – a rule that I have outlined only referring to the categories of gender, age and familiar status. Certainly, other categories (such as social and economic status) as well as personal sympathy or “chemistry” played a role in the way villagers related to me and I to them.

On the one hand, being a young woman offered me a sort of epistemological privilege of the oppressed
(see Harding 1991), which made to me visible and tangible the difficulties and discriminations female
and/or young Kyrgyzstani experience in their everyday. On the other hand, being European granted me a
series of privileges that are inaccessible to young Kyrgyzstani women – and to many Kyrgyzstani *tout court*. My particular multiple identities allowed me to enter spaces and relate to persons by mobilising a specific identity each time. For instance, as a woman, I could develop intimate relations with women in the village and, as a young woman, also with some young women. As a foreigner, however, I could have access to masculine spaces that would be inaccessible to local women. Considering these particular positions in the analysis will allow to reveal some of the power structures that determine these privileges and discriminations (see Militz, Faria, and Schurr 2019).

## Language and translation

Pjak is a homogeneously ethnic Kyrgyz village. Villagers there speak Kyrgyz in their everyday; most of them (with the exception of a few younger people and several children) can speak Russian well – although not all like to speak Russian. I could reach an acceptable level of Russian that allowed me to engage in everyday conversations and some deeper discussions; lamentably, I was able to learn only very basic Kyrgyz. For most of the formal interviews and many of the informal interactions, I was accompanied by an interpreter. For the duration of my fieldwork in Pjak, I lived in Kumbat’s house, with some regular visits to Karakol. My interpreters lived in Karakol and would join me during the day in Pjak, variably between three and five times a week. I spent the rest of the time “alone” (without interpreter, but certainly not without company) in the village, engaging in informal conversation, participant observation and the flux of everyday life – in these cases, I mostly interacted with villagers in Russian. When my interpreter was present, either for formal interviews or informal conversations, my interlocutors usually preferred to speak in Kyrgyz and let the interpreter translate for me into English. For the rare interviews or conversations in Russian, I asked the interpreter to translate passages where I was unsure of my understanding. Similarly, if in a conversation I conducted alone I was unsure about some passages I estimated important, I checked them later with the interpreter.

In 2014 and 2016 I collaborated with Saikal, a considerate but determined young Kyrgyz woman in her early twenties from a well-off family of Karakol, who had just graduated from the prestigious (and expensive) American University in Bishkek. In 2015 and 2017 I collaborated with Elzada, an active and very talkative Kyrgyz woman in her forties from Karakol, who works as a freelance interpreter while simultaneously engaging in innumerable other small businesses. The relation with both women was initially mostly a commercial, paid arrangement, but friendships developed, especially with Saikal. Certainly, the nature of our relationship influenced the way we collaborated: for instance, Elzada (for whom interpretation is her profession) probably felt pressure sometimes to perform a “good” translation even if the original speech was confused and difficult to understand. Or, as a proud Kyrgyz, she probably sometimes obscured some details she considered negative for the image of the country and its people, whereas Saikal often translated to me narrations that our interlocutors deemed embarrassing and asked her not to translate. Certainly, the presence of the interpreter also influenced the way people interacted with me. Whereas for Saikal it was sometimes difficult to grasp villagers’ references to the Soviet past, Kyrgyz tradition or political scams, Elzada was at ease with such references and could expand them into
explanations for me. Although useful, such “explanations” were also sometimes challenging, since, first, she did not always separate the original statement from what her own expansion and, second, she often overinterpreted people’s statements according to her own references. Also, Saikal’s discretion and politeness probably often made people more at ease to share their lives and stories with us than did Elzada’s sometimes intrusive talkativeness.

Not only the person and positionality of the interpreter, but also the process of translation, influenced the experience that emerged through my fieldwork (see Rubel and Rosman 2003). My limited access to people’s original words, expressions, intonations, hesitations and emphases certainly constitutes an important weakness of my research, which was at least in part reduced thanks to the long moments and interactions I experienced with villagers without an interpreter. At the same time, collaborating with an interpreter also represented an opportunity. First, the interpreters were precious sources of local knowledge and could provide me with explanations about specific terms, expressions, cultural references and habits. Second, I could check in real time my own interpretations and reflections about what we were observing during fieldwork: I especially spent a lot of time reflecting and discussing events, connections, hypotheses with Saikal. Third, the process of translation also sometimes produced interesting moments that revealed deeper ambiguities, mismatches and power relations. This was the case, for instance, when the interpreter had to negotiate with the interlocutor, either because the latter did not understand her question or because the interpreter did not understand the answer; or also when she had to negotiate with me because she could not understand my question or I could not understand her answer. Such moments – although frustrating when experienced in real time – were precious during the analysis.

## 5.3 Constituting data and experience

### 5.3.1 Research stays in Kyrgyzstan

Table 5.2 summarises the phases of fieldwork with their different specific aims and foci.

<table><caption>Table 5.2: Main activities and points of focus during research stays in Kyrgyzstan</caption><thead><tr><th>Time</th><th>Places, activities and topics</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><strong>2014 – 2 months</strong></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>August</td><td><em>Bishkek</em><br>Language course (Russian)<br>Networking with scholars and development practitioners:<ul><li>Exploration of current relevant topics for research</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>September</td><td><em>Chui, Issyk-Kul, Naryn, Jalalabad, Osh and Batken provinces</em><br>Exploration of different contexts to identify a case study:<ul><li>Relation to the past and to land</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td><strong>2015 – 2.5 months</strong></td><td></td></tr><tr><td>June–July</td><td><em>Issyk-Kul province</em><br>Refusal of Oktjabr to collaborate<br>Exploration of other cooperatives<ul><li>History and activities of the cooperatives</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>August</td><td><em>Pjak</em><br>Exploratory fieldwork in Pjak with the Ak-Bulut cooperative</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td></td><td><ul><li>History and activities of the cooperative, meeting members</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>September</td><td><strong>Bishkek</strong><br>Interviews with development practitioners<br><ul><li>Promotion of cooperatives in the country</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>2016 – 5.5 months</strong></td></tr><tr><td>March</td><td><strong>Pjak</strong><br>Presentation of my research and fieldwork plan to key villagers</td></tr><tr><td>April–May</td><td><strong>Pjak</strong><br>Ethnographic fieldwork<br><ul><li>Ak-Bulut cooperative: meeting new members, clarifying history and activities</li><li>Agricultural practices today</li><li>Agricultural practices in the past</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>June</td><td><strong>Bishkek</strong><br>Presentation of preliminary results (American University, Bishkek)<br>Revision and adaptation of fieldwork plan, strategy and focus</td></tr><tr><td>June–August</td><td><strong>Pjak</strong><br>Ethnographic fieldwork<br><ul><li>Agricultural practices today</li><li>Agricultural practices in the past</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td>September</td><td><strong>Bishkek</strong><br>Interviews and meetings with scholars and development practitioners<br><ul><li>Discussion of preliminary findings</li></ul></td></tr><tr><td colspan="2"><strong>2017 – 2 months</strong></td></tr><tr><td>June–July</td><td><strong>Bishkek; Jalalabad, Osh, Naryn and Issyk-Kul provinces</strong><br>Further discussions with scholars and practitioners in Bishkek; further exploration of cooperatives and agricultural practices in other regions<br><strong>Pjak</strong><br>Quantitative survey (conducted by interpreter)</td></tr><tr><td>August–September</td><td><strong>Pjak and Issyk-Kul province</strong><br>Ethnographic fieldwork<br><ul><li>Follow-up of agricultural practices</li><li>Diverse economies in the village</li><li>Visits to other cooperatives and agricultural enterprises in the region</li></ul></td></tr></table>

### 5.3.2 A range of methods to engage with the field

I engaged with the field through a wide set of qualitative (and one quantitative) methods, as is usual within an ethnographic methodology, including oral histories, participant observation, and others (for oral histories see Abrams 2010; for all other methods see Crang and Cook 2007; and Flick, Kardorff, and Steinke 2004; for ethnographic participant observation see also Davies 1999). Fieldwork activities took place mostly in Pjak and the four neighbouring villages of Kok-Bulak *aiyl*.<fnref n="10" /> Besides the explorative phases in 2014 and in 2015, some other activities took place outside Kok-Bulak: I conducted interviews with key actors in the *rayon* centre (Cheken), in the *oblast* administrative capital (Karakol) as well as in the capital of Bishkek; I visited other cooperatives, farming enterprises and events (e.g. fairs) in the region. I also followed the extensions of the village community (in particular of my host family) outside the village: I visited villagers’ relatives and friends in Bishkek, Karakol and other villages in the region, for friendly visits or for special occasions like marriages or family celebrations.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ See §3.1.1. for the territorial administrative organisation in Kyrgyzstan. Pjak is one of the five villages (intended as separate settlements) composing Kok-Bulak *aiyl*. In this section, when I refer to Kok-Bulak I intend the whole administrative territory of the *aiyl*. In the manuscript, when I refer to the “village” I usually intend only Pjak. Pjak counts about 350 households.</footnote>
At the beginning of fieldwork in Kok-Bulak I targeted villagers who were related to the cooperative Ak-Bulut in some way. It was Kumbat who indicated to me cooperative members, and often he introduced me to them. These persons indicated other villagers who were in some way related to the cooperative. Later, I diversified the typologies of villagers with whom I developed contact, especially in terms of age, gender, social and economic status and economic activities, and I also included villagers in my network who were unrelated to the cooperative as well as villagers who were not part of Kumbat's close personal networks. I became close to about 60 villagers and their families, visiting them regularly for formal interviews or informal chats, while with many others I had more sporadic interactions. Although I tried to diversify the villagers I would visit more often according to the variables just mentioned, it is clear that personal sympathy played an important role in determining the kind and frequency of interaction: some villagers were more open than others to welcome me in their houses and spend time with me – and I personally enjoyed the company of some more than of others. Furthermore, the time of the day and of the year in which I was present played a big role in people's availability to spend time with me, depending on the calendar of agricultural activities and social celebrations.

## Formal narrative and semi-structured interviews

I conducted several sets of formal interviews with 32 main informants in Pjak and about 30 additional informants in the other villages of Kok-Bulak, for a total of several hundred interviews. I conducted several sets of interviews with the same persons throughout the three years I visited the village. Each set of interviews had a general topic and specific aims, including the role within Ak-Bulut or relation with it, agricultural practices (in particular how agricultural work in the different season is organised), and other cooperation practices in the village. I privileged narrative interviews with large open questions as the main inputs from my side, but I also conducted more standardised and semi-structured interviews. I developed different interview guidelines for each fieldwork phase and set of interviews: the guidelines fixed the main topics I wanted to discuss during the interviews and entailed both broad open questions and more specific questions that could serve to re-launch the conversation. With a few exceptions, these interviews were not recorded but I took live notes on my field book. The length of the interviews varied between a few minutes to several hours, depending on the availability and talkativeness of my interlocutors.

## Oral histories

I conducted up to six sessions of oral history with each of 12 elderly villagers (above 60 years old) in addition to a dozen of one-time biographical interviews with other younger villagers. The oral histories covered the time span from childhood to the present day and sometimes included secondary memories of the time before the birth of the narrator. After an introductory session where I explained the principles and aims of my oral history project, each session was centred on a specific topic (e.g. an aspect of work in the Soviet farm, personal life, the establishment of private agriculture after the dismantlement of the
Soviet farm) and started with a general open question that usually lead to a long narration, which was re-launched with more specific questions or clarification questions. I developed guidelines for each session with the main topics I wanted to discuss. Each session, lasting between 30 minutes and several hours, was recorded.

## Participant observation

I participated actively in village life during my stays in Pjak, living in the village and sharing everyday life with villagers. Focused observation was mainly directed to agricultural practices in the fields, household plots, houses, as well as in other locations in Kok-Bulak (streets, warehouse, etc.). I followed a dozen villagers in their agricultural activities from spring to autumn in 2016 and in the summers of 2015 and 2017. I participated in public events in Kok-Bulak, such as fairs, ceremonies, formal and informal gatherings as well as to private events such as celebrations, feasts and commemorations. I spent long hours drinking tea and chatting with villagers in their kitchens or gardens. With my host family, I shared most aspects of everyday life such as eating, cooking, cleaning, washing, joining for the summer *remont*, collecting fruits in the garden and preparing jam, going to the *banja* or to the bazaar, visiting friends and relatives, doing homework with the children and a lot more. Sometimes, informal chats over tea transformed into long analyses of the current political or economic situation or tales about past events; in some cases, I took notes. Every evening, I expanded my fieldnotes to include chats and observations that seemed most relevant.

I held a separate field book where I noted the evolution of my thoughts and feelings during the time I spent in Kyrgyzstan. I paid special attention to the emotions I experienced during particular encounters or situations and in reaction to what I had heard or seen during the day, as well as to the transformation of my affective attachments to villagers, places, situations and ideas. The aim was to observe the more-than-representational aspects of life in the village (especially embodied affects and emotions) on my own body, through the “impregnation” of the researching subject in local life (Olivier de Sardan 2008).

## Interviews with civil servants and local authorities

I held semi-structured and open interviews with civil servants and local authorities at the *aiyl*, *rayon* and *oblast* levels, in particular (but not exclusively) with the responsible persons for agricultural issues. Some of the interviews were aimed at understanding the position of local authorities concerning agricultural development in general and cooperatives in particular and their role in promoting them. For these interviews, I had a common guideline that fixed the topics I wanted to touch on in the interview. Other interviews were instead aimed at collecting more general information about the functioning of local governance and administration, for instance about the tax or cadastre system. In this case, interviews were more open and tailored to each person. I did not record these interviews, but I took live notes on my field book.
Acquiring access to civil servants and local authorities was not always easy. At the *oblast* level, my interpreter Elzada helped me through her personal network of acquaintances. In the absence of personal contacts, we just showed up in an office and waited until someone would speak with us or give us an appointment for another day. At the *rayon* level, Kumbat had several acquaintances; however, they were rarely available for an extended interview and often skipped our appointments. At the *aiyl* level, I became friends with one of Kumbat's several good friends at the local administration. Although not always available, he sometimes took time to discuss with me in length and depth whatever topic I was proposing. The other civil servants and local authorities were less open and often quite suspicious of me; they either tried to indefinitely postpone our meetings or, when they accepted, their answers remained usually very vague.

## Quantitative survey

In June 2017 I shortly visited Pjak to come back only one month later. I asked my interpreter Elzada to conduct a quantitative survey during my absence. The survey was planned for a duration of 10–15 minutes and was divided in three parts: general information about the household, its agricultural activities and its involvement in farmer organisations. Apart from some open questions, most questions required selecting pre-given answers that I developed based on the practices I had observed in the village in the previous years. For instance, the survey asked “Who participates in the fieldwork on your field?” and “Do these people receive compensation for their labour?” and proposed the following answers: family members from the same house, other relatives, neighbours by house, neighbours by plot, friends, others; and the options: I pay them a salary in cash, I pay them a salary in kind, labour exchange (they work on my plot, I work on theirs), no compensation, others.

Elzada filled 65 questionnaires with representatives of an equal number of households in Pjak (where there are in total about 350 households). We did not have a strategy to guarantee the representativity of the sample, since the aim of the survey was to reinforce my overview of agricultural and cooperation practices in the village rather than to produce statistically representative data about them. Several villagers refused to participate in the survey or answered with an explicitly suspicious attitude. In these cases, they explained that they either had no time or that they had already answered to a similar survey few days before: in summer 2017 several political groups conducted surveys in the framework of the campaign for the upcoming presidential election.

## Visits to other cooperatives and enterprises

I visited other cooperatives and farming enterprises in the region between 2014 and 2017. I arrived at these cooperatives and enterprises either because someone had told me about them when hearing that I was working on cooperatives and agriculture, or because I saw their advertisements. The visits usually included a formal discussion with the owner about the history of the cooperative/enterprise and its
activities and a visit to its infrastructures and fields, accompanied by informal chats with the owner, his/her family and sometimes other members or employees.

## Interviews with development workers

I conducted several semi-structured and open interviews with employees of local and international development organisations, mainly in Bishkek but also in Karakol. These interviews were aimed at understanding not only the specific activities of the organisation concerning the promotion of cooperatives and, more generally, rural development, but also their representation of the situation of cooperatives and of the agricultural sector in the country. I contacted these persons either through the website of the organisation or by visiting their offices. Since English is widespread in the development sector, these interviews were often in English, though with some exceptions in Russian (with or without an interpreter). I did not record these interviews, but I took live notes on my field book. The attitude of development practitioners towards me varied strongly, from enthusiastically collaborative to shut off due to a closed-door policy.

## Document analysis

Through all these encounters I collected several and diverse documents, including (among others) documentation of cooperatives, statistics, legal documents (laws, strategies), project documents of development organisations, minutes of community meetings and cadastre maps. I did not have a systematic strategy for collecting specific types of documents; rather, whenever the opportunity arose during interviews or chats, I asked for a specific document.

## 5.4 Making sense of experience and constructing knowledge

The engagement with the field as described in the previous section constituted a large amount of empirical material, as summarised in Table 5.3.

<table><caption>Table 5.3: Empirical material</caption><tr><td>Transcripts</td><td>Interviews (including oral histories): recorded interviews were transcribed later; extended notes from unrecorded interviews were compiled the same day or soon thereafter based on live notes and memory.</td></tr><tr><td>Expanded fieldnotes</td><td>Informal conversations, participant observation: I wrote expanded fieldnotes the same day or little after the event, based on my memory and, if available, live notes; in case of doubt I checked them with the interpreter or later with the interlocutor.</td></tr><tr><td>Researcher's personal diaries</td><td>Participant observation</td></tr><tr><td>Documents and images</td><td>Documentation of the cooperative Ak-Bulut and other cooperatives, statistics, legal documents (laws, strategies), project documents of development organisations, minutes of community meetings, cadastre maps</td></tr><tr><td>Quantitative database</td><td>Quantitative survey</td></tr></table>
Data analysis, as the rest of the research process, was not a linear but rather an iterative process characterised by continuous back-and-forth between different corpora of data and theoretical or thematic readings – a process that started while in the field and that will extend at least until the final point of this manuscript. In practice, data analysis consisted of several activities happening in sequence as well as simultaneously: the procedure I adopted<fnref n="11" /> corresponds roughly to Crang and Cook’s Grounded Theory-inspired procedure of coding and building categories (Crang and Cook 2007, 131–49; see also Cloke et al. 2004, 307–35; Flick, Kardorff, and Steinke 2004, 248–330).

Crang and Cook (2007, 134–40) suggest to start<fnref n="12" /> with an extensive reading of the empirical material: the aim is to loosely note down important topics and themes that emerge from the reading process in a sort of loose “open coding”. The advantage of reading big portions of data extensively is that one can at least partially “recapture some of the emotional flavour and the interpersonal situations that produced the material” (id. 137): this is particularly important within a constructivist epistemology that acknowledges, as discussed above, that data emerge through the specific and contingent research process. In my case, this extensive reading was a back-and-forth consultation of interview transcripts, extended fieldnotes and personal diaries – but also pictures, objects, tastes, smells and sounds to recall their “emotional flavour”.

A second phase, also based on Crang and Cook (id. 140–2), is a more focused reading of the same material, or only of the parts that are deemed most relevant according to the previous open coding, with a more intensive and precise activity of coding. In this phase, different types of codes and categories can be used, based on emic or etic categories (but see the critique of this distinction in Cloke et al. 2004, 314–15), on the wording occurring in the original text or on theoretical categories developed by the researcher. The further engagement with the text passages ascribed to each code and category aims at identifying connections, relations, parallels, overlapping, oppositions between the previous codes and categories (Crang and Cook 2007, 142–46). This should lead to the emergence of further codes and categories. Crang and Cook suggest that it is important to write extensively the reflections, ideas and doubts that emerge during all these phases and to come back to them regularly. During this analysis process I mainly assumed an inductive approach, letting themes and categories emerge from my observations. These themes and categories directed me towards specific readings and conceptual framings, which in their turn flowed into data analysis, determining further analytical categories. In particular, as discussed above, my empirical observations led me to integrate Gibson-Graham’s diverse economies approach (2006a; 2006b, see §4.1), which I later used as a framework for analysis within the procedure described here.

While conducting this analysis, Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis was particularly useful, since it provides a more concrete framework for analysing how discourse is co-constituted in everyday life (Fairclough 2003; see also Jørgensen and Phillips 2002). For Fairclough, “language-as-discourse is *both* a form of action [...] through which people can change the world *and* a form of action which is socially and historically situated and in a dialectical relationship with other aspects of the social” (Jørgensen and

<footnote n="11">¹¹ This procedure was supported by the use of the Software NVivo but also included considerable amounts of paper that were coloured, cut, glued, re-arranged.</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² But, again: the process is iterative.</footnote>
Phillips 2002, 62). Discourse is thus analysed as a social practice that “both reproduces and changes knowledge, identities and social relations including power relations, and at the same time is also shaped by other social practices and structures” (id. 65). Fairclough proposes a three-dimensional model for critical analysis that focuses on three dimensions of communicative events: first, discourse is analysed as a text, focusing on its linguistic structure; second, discourse is analysed as a discursive practice, focusing on the way in which the text is produced and consumed; and third, discourse is analysed as a social practice, expanding its interpretation to broader social or cultural theories.

## 5.5 Writing the thesis manuscript

Writing is forcibly an interpretation process that is always partial; at the same time, it is also through writing that interpretations and meanings emerge. Following Gibson-Graham’s (2014) suggestion, I commit to a practice of thick description: as a result, in the next four chapters I often delve into illustrating the details of my research experience before providing a more theoretically informed analysis and condensing the relevant emerging knowledge in discussion sections. I have chosen to present my research experience mostly by using the present tense. The “ethnographic present”, however, should not be intended as expressing “a vague and essentially atemporal moment” or as “reflecting the ahistorical or synchronic pretense of anthropology” (Hastrup 1990, 45). It rather “preserves the reality of an anthropological knowledge” that “transcends the historical moment” (id. 45, 57) while simultaneously insisting on the situatedness of ethnographic knowledge in the embodied experience of the researcher.

A doctoral thesis’s manuscript is a form of text with specific codes, rules and requirements; however, several writing modalities exist (see Crang and Cook 2007, 150–206). For the present manuscript, I have opted for a generally traditional mode of writing, with some less-usual moves. In particular, in the analytical chapters I attempt to counter the illusory representation of coherence in the research process and instead to maintain visibility of the non-linearity of the research process, its fluctuations and detours in order to show that learning is about transforming oneself. I thus make this transformation visible to the reader, not hiding or reformulating in retrospective the assumptions and arguments I believed in different moments of the research process but instead laying them bare, even if these assumptions and arguments now seem, in hindsight, naïve, inaccurate or even dangerous. For instance, in Chapter 6, I first present the narrative of “failed cooperatives” in Kyrgyzstan as a newcomer to the field (as I was) would experience it; only in a second moment I will bring in further material that will allow me to deconstruct this narrative.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="13">¹³ This strategy resembles, and is indeed inspired by, how Gibson-Graham (2006b, 8–10) presents her deconstruction of economic representations.</footnote>
Part II – Conclusion

Part II has outlined the conceptual and methodological approach with which I based my analysis of cooperatives and cooperation promotion in Kyrgyzstan, the Issyk-Kul province and Pjak. This approach allowed me to remain open to the unpredictability of cooperation experiences because it conceptualises the latter as relational practices that are not defined by an explicit collective goal or interest but that are rather unpredictable, constituted through everyday intimate relations and, in turn, constitutive of relations and subjectivities. Within this approach, research means first of all a transformation of the researching subject: her representations, affects and transformation along the research process become a central element in the analysis.

The next two parts of the manuscript engage with such an analysis of my empirical experience. Part III focuses on representations and practices of the promotion of cooperatives by development and governmental actors in Kyrgyzstan (Chapter 6) and by villagers in the Issyk-Kul province and in Pjak (Chapter 7). Part IV then expands the analysis to the diverse economies of agriculture in Pjak in the past (Chapter 8) and in the present (Chapter 9). The two parts and the four chapters are built in a similar way, following a strategy that exposes the messiness, fragmentation and intricate trajectory of the research process instead of obscuring them by ascribing in retrospective a coherence and linearity to this process. I start thus by introducing, sometimes in a way that might appear naïve, my impressions of the research objects when I started engaging with them. Only in a second moment do I bring in further empirical material that allows me to expand the analysis by acknowledging and engaging with the complexity of the researched processes. Each part and chapter, then, concludes with a section that relates this complexity to the conceptual reflections and theoretical approaches presented and discussed in the first two parts of the manuscript.
# Part III – Promoting cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan: representations and practices

Part III analyses the representations and practices related to the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. Chapter 6 approaches this topic from the perspective of the actors that, since the independence of the country, have been active in the promotion of cooperatives countrywide: international donors, development agencies, development workers and governmental actors. The chapter starts by illustrating the terms of the narrative, produced by these actors, that states that cooperatives in the country have failed. I then proceed to deconstruct this narrative and show that the promotion of cooperatives is itself a fragmentary process consisting of often contradictory practices and representations by the individual actors involved in this process. The chapter concludes by discussing how the narrative of failed cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan mirrors a broader developmentalist discourse that reproduces dichotomous categories on the basis of a teleological vision of development and modernity – a discourse that is common worldwide and especially in the Global South.

Chapter 7 engages with the other side of the promotion of cooperatives: the side of whom are considered the “beneficiaries”. I analyse how villagers reproduce, but also reinterpret, the narrative of failed cooperatives, illustrating this process by means of the example of cooperatives in the Issyk-Kul province and in particular of the cooperative Ak-Bulut in Pjak. I dig into a detailed analysis of the representations and practices related to Ak-Bulut and to other forms of agricultural activities and cooperation in Pjak and show that cooperatives are a much more complex, fluid and changeable concept than assumed by most scholars and development workers. Part III therefore concludes by restating the need to abandon the common definitions and categorisations (or fantasies) of cooperatives in order to be able to engage with processes of cooperation as they are already performed.
# 6 REPRESENTATIONS AND PRACTICES OF THE PROMOTION OF COOPERATIVES IN CONTEMPORARY KYRGYZSTAN

The topic of cooperatives was marginal in donor programmes in Kyrgyzstan at least until the beginning of the 2000s, when it gained visibility thanks to the Development of Trade and Service Cooperatives project. The project, implemented between 2003 and 2007, was funded by the German Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ, now the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit, or GIZ) and was the first in Kyrgyzstan to specifically and directly focus on cooperative development. The project aimed at creating a favourable environment for the establishment of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan through different measures: it engaged in lobbying ministries for the introduction of the promotion of cooperatives in the governmental strategies for agricultural development; it supported the parliament in drafting the new Law on Cooperatives, which was passed in 2004; and it established the Cooperative Union of Kyrgyzstan (CUK), an independent association aimed at supporting potential and existing cooperatives and representing their interests. Finally, it financed specific measures to directly promote the establishment of new cooperatives, in particular training sessions on cooperative organisation, and, in collaboration with private actors, credit and leasing facilitation for cooperatives. In the same years, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) similarly provided training sessions on cooperative organisation and facilitations for cooperatives in the framework of its rural development programmes. Moreover, since the late 2000s JICA has organised and sponsored training sessions on rural development for cadres (including civil servants, members of parliament and cooperative leaders) at the University of Hokkaido in Japan; these training sessions include a module on the establishment and management of cooperatives.

Following the examples of GIZ and JICA, other development agencies active in Kyrgyzstan (e.g. USAID, SDC, DFID, the World Bank or ACTED) included the promotion of cooperatives as a component of their rural development programmes. Without specifically focusing on the promotion of cooperatives, several of these programmes offered credit and leasing facilitation for cooperatives and included the topic of cooperative organisation in their training programmes. Some also provided advice to policy-makers on the revision of legislation concerning farmer organisations, including cooperatives. Encouraged by these agencies, the government of Kyrgyzstan thus included the promotion of cooperatives in its national development strategies and partially revised legislation concerning cooperatives. Especially during Bakiev's mandate (2005–2010), the government promised, and sometimes realised, some specific measures aiming at increasing the number of registered cooperatives in the country.

As a consequence of these initiatives, the number of registered cooperatives in the country exploded in the 2000s.<fnref n="1" /> Since the early 2010s, however, the interest of development agencies in promoting

<footnote n="1">¹ Especially because of the ambiguous definition of cooperatives in legislation, statistical data on cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan are hardly reliable. Governmental documents present differing figures on the evolution of the number of cooperatives after 1991 (see also Beishenaly and Namazova's review of official data, 2012, 18–25). Despite these variations, the different datasets report consistently a boom of registered cooperatives in the mid-2000s. This trend seems realistic if we consider the implementation of</footnote>
cooperatives has reduced. Although the topic of cooperatives remains part of the training programmes of these agencies and has a fixed mention in governmental strategies for rural development, the role of cooperatives in these programmes and strategies, and in their implementation, is marginal. The number of cooperatives in the country seems to be decreasing (see previous footnote), further fuelling to the widespread narrative of “failed cooperatives” in the country. In this chapter, I analyse this narrative, how it is constructed, reproduced and sometimes questioned, by the actors that have actively promoted cooperatives in the country. I start (§6.1) with a review of existing academic and grey literature on cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan – a literature that generally agrees with the reading of “failure” of cooperatives.

## 6.1 The narrative of failed cooperatives by scholars

Specific literature on cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan is limited: its main corpus is composed by (often grey) literature derived from applied research commissioned by development institutions (Lerman 2013a; Lerman and Sedik 2009a; 2009b; 2014; 2017; Beishenaly and Namazova 2012; Van Rijsoort and Van den Berg 2012).<fnref n="2" /> A few publications attempt to discuss the topic on a more conceptual level (Gardner and Lerman 2006; Lerman and Sedik 2018). Several of these studies do not focus specifically on Kyrgyzstan but analyse the situation of cooperatives in Central Asia or in CEE and FSU countries. These studies are rooted in the discipline of agricultural and development economics and usually present a gloomy picture of the current situation of cooperatives in these regions.

### 6.1.1 Service cooperatives to correct market failures

Studies on cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan base their understanding of cooperatives on the ICA's definition and principles presented at the beginning of Chapter 2 (see e.g. Lerman 2013a, 7) and distinguish different types of cooperatives according to what Lerman (ibid.) calls the “Western classification” of cooperatives, reported in Table 2.2. These studies usually focus on agricultural cooperatives, probably because the agricultural sector presents the highest number of cooperatives. Authors point to the “unfinished agenda” of post-independence reforms and to persistent or new difficulties for farmers (Lerman and Sedik 2009a, see §3.1.2). The “curse of smallness” for farmers, due to the fragmentation of agricultural production, concerns in particular the access to markets for agricultural inputs and their

<footnote>measures promoting cooperatives in that period. The dataset of the Ministry of Agriculture (reported in id. 19–20), which probably underestimates the number of cooperatives, shows a doubling of the number of cooperatives from 2005 (375) to 2006 (778) and a further doubling by 2011 (1428), followed, however, by a drastic decrease in 2014 (to 372). On its previous website, CUK counted 374 member cooperatives in 2011 (http://www.cooperativ.kg/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=30:istoriya-razvitiya-kooperativnogo-sektora-v-kr&catid=9:publikatsii accessed 14.07.2016); its new website counted about 220 member cooperatives in 2019 (https://cooperativ.kg/spisok-chlenov-skk/ accessed 06.09.2019). According to the news site kabar.kg there were about 4,000 registered cooperatives in the country in 2014 (87% in agriculture or animal farming), out of which, however, only 274 were “functioning” and only about 200 were members of CUK (http://www.kabar.kg/rus/economics/full/80419 accessed 14.07.2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² The last two references are reports commissioned by JICA and the Dutch foundation Agriterra, respectively. Both reports are not available online, which obviously dramatically limits their influence. The remaining publications, as one can note, are authored or co-authored by the same person (Zvi Lerman): many of them are edited by the FAO or the World Bank.</footnote>
purchase conditions; the access to marketing channels for agricultural outputs and their sale conditions; and the access to machinery, information, credit and insurance (Lerman 2013a, 5; also Lerman and Sedik 2014; Abele and Frohberg 2003).

Economic theory often frames these difficulties as “market imperfections” or “market failures” and identifies in cooperative organisations a possible solution to balance them (e.g. Ortmann and King 2007, see §2.1.2). Lerman (2013a, 9 emphasis added) indeed notes that “in agriculture and other areas, service cooperatives fulfil the important function of correcting for market failure, by stepping in to provide missing services and counteracting monopolistic exploitation by private initiative”. In all his publications on cooperatives (not limited to Kyrgyzstan), Lerman strongly emphasises that only service cooperatives can effectively perform this function. He argues that production cooperatives, where members pool their smallholdings, cannot “exploit economies of scale and achieve higher efficiency” because “empirical studies in market economies show that economies of scale do not generally exist in primary agriculture and [...] that agricultural production cooperatives are substantially less efficient than individual and family farms” (id. 8).

In his work on “agrarian postsocialist transition”, Lerman (e.g. 2009; Lerman, Csaki, and Feder 2004; Lerman and Sedik 2009b; 2018) maintains that the individualisation of agriculture in ex-socialist countries is the main factor that led first to the recovery and then to the increase of agricultural production after the end of socialist regimes. He thus strongly argues for agrarian reforms for the privatisation of agricultural land and for the development of small- to medium-scale family farming. Since, however, he underlines that “transition” contexts are usually characterised by deeper “market imperfections” than established market economies, Lerman argues that (service) cooperatives can (and actually did) play an important role in these contexts. In their quick overview of agricultural cooperatives in “transition economies”, Gardner and Lerman (2006, 15) note that production cooperatives have been used as a way to replace former collective farms while service cooperatives as a means for farmers to obtain market power: they conclude that the former “have been overwhelmingly failures” whereas the latter “have been moderately successful”.

Agricultural economists usually support these arguments and the privileging of service cooperatives (see §2.1.2). Already in 1995, Deininger (1995, 1317), dealing with the question whether collective agricultural production could be a solution for “transition economies”, suggested that “in an environment characterized by high risk, incomplete markets for insurance, credit, inputs and outputs, cooperative organisations can perform an extremely useful function”. Deininger (ibid.) maintained the superior effectiveness of service cooperatives and the inefficiency of production cooperatives, and claimed for policies designed “to facilitate the emergence of competitive service cooperatives rather than relatively inefficient units of collective production”.
6.1.2 “A psychological resistance to cooperation”: explanations for the failure of cooperatives

As anticipated, scholars mostly frame cooperatives or the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as failed. Lerman (2013a) notes that, despite the increased number of cooperatives, their presence in rural areas is too limited. Beishenaly and Namazova (2012, 12) call attention to the phenomenon of “fictive” cooperatives: cooperatives that were created in order to get facilitated access to donor resources or credit but that “have little or never pursued their activities”. According to Lerman and Sedik’s (2017, 236–37) calculations, “fictive” cooperatives could represent almost three fourths of all registered cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. According to Beishenaly’s and Namazova’s (2012, 24) survey on 14 cooperatives in the country, farmers evaluate positively the membership in a cooperative, which they see as “beneficial” or at least “convenient”; however, the same survey suggests that most cooperatives are undercapitalised, lack a clear planning for the future and have difficulties in providing farmers with the needed services (id. 39– 44). Therefore, the authors hint to a problem of long-term sustainability of cooperative activities, which are “very dependent on external factors such as support programs initiated by international organisations or the government” (id. 25, see also Van Rijsoort and Van den Berg 2012). Indeed, donors’ and governments’ strategies have mainly focused on incentives for the establishment of new cooperatives but rarely address the continuation of their activities in the medium- and long-term. Finally, both Lerman (2013a; also Lerman and Sedik 2013) and Beishenaly and Namazova (2012) point to discrepancies between different legislative texts concerning cooperatives, despite donors’ initiatives to support a revision of legislation. Such discrepancies have concrete implications, especially for taxation. Since it can be unclear to which legal category a cooperative belongs, it is also difficult to determine what type of tax scheme should be applied; this not only gives rise to confusion but also opens room for personal interpretation – and thus for corruption (Beishenaly and Namazova 2012, 14–17).

For Lerman and Sedik (2009b, 16), the failure of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan cannot be due to the unsuitability of the proposed model, since, they argue, “in transition economies, where the market environment is still underdeveloped and not fully function, *the benefits of cooperation appear to be self-evident*” (emphasis added). In line with other scholars of postsocialism (see Chapter 2), therefore, Lerman and colleagues explain this failure mainly with legacies from the socialist past. It is worth quoting a long example of this explanation since its framing widely shapes representations of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan as well as in other ex-socialist countries:<fnref n="3" />

The large collective farms [...] were administered under the label of cooperatives in the formerly socialist countries, even when they had not evolved out of voluntary associations but were imposed from above in a forced collectivization process. Consequently, among many of the rural population the concept of cooperation in agricultural production appears to have lost, if it ever had, the positive and idealistic connotations it has had in the traditional cooperative movement throughout Europe and North America. In its place, we find a *strong psychological resistance to cooperation, bred from years of abuse of the whole concept by*

<footnote n="3">³ Note that we have already come across their phrasing in Chapter 2.</footnote>
*socialist regimes*. As noted by the Plunkett Foundation (1995), 'The use of the word "co-operative" in Central and Eastern Europe will not only create the wrong impression, it will also create barriers to progress. The old style of co-operative or collective has no relevance in the new free-market approach'. (Gardner and Lerman 2006, 5 emphasis added)

In Lerman’s (2013a) survey on 1,000 randomly selected peasants in Kyrgyzstan, 42% of the respondents mentioned the preservation of the own independence as one of the reasons for not joining a cooperative. Lerman (id. 27) interprets this data as “reflect[ing] the ingrained influence of Soviet-style production cooperatives” on his respondents and thus as a further confirmation of the “psychological resistance” mentioned in the previous quotation.

In another study, Lerman and Sedik (2009a, 17) note that Kyrgyzstan’s government and farmers are progressively becoming more open to cooperatives; however, the authors also note the persistence of “a great deal of general confusion about what type of cooperatives are desirable (service cooperatives in the broad sense of the word) and what type of cooperatives should not be promoted (production cooperatives) in the light of experiences in market economies”. Lerman (2013a, 4), referring to the same study of the Plunkett Foundation mentioned in the quotation above, attributes the cause of this confusion to habits and concepts inherited from the former socialist regimes and notes that “instead of Western-style service cooperatives, the very concept of cooperative in Central Asia is automatically interpreted as a production cooperative, i.e. a model of the Soviet-style collective farm”. According to Lerman, this “misunderstanding” is also widespread among government representatives and is one of the causes for the inconsistencies within the legislative framework noted above. Furthermore, Gardner and Lerman (2006, 8 emphasis added) lament that “agricultural cooperatives in transition countries *are not really cooperatives* in the Western sense of the word”. Lerman (2013a, 23–24) finds out that 88% of registered cooperatives are classified as production cooperatives in the statistics of Kyrgyzstan’s Ministry of Agriculture’s and that, among the remaining 12%, there are “virtually no pure service cooperatives”. Again, Lerman interprets this data as the confirmation of a general confusion about different types of cooperatives – a confusion, again, issued from the persistence of the Soviet referent for cooperatives.

The solution proposed by Lerman and colleagues for improving the situation of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan – and in other ex-socialist countries as well – is “technical assistance from international donors” (Lerman and Sedik 2009a, 17), in particular in the form of “a special public awareness campaign [...] to explain what cooperatives are in market economies, how they function, and what benefits farmers derive from membership” (Lerman 2013a, 14). This “educational effort” should emphasise the difference between the desirable model of service cooperatives and the model of production cooperatives, which is to be avoided because of its lower efficiency (id. 14–15).

Beishenaly and Namazova (2012, 44) agree in identifying in the “lack of understanding” of the cooperative concept one of the causes for the difficulties of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan (see also Van Rijsoort and Van den Berg 2012). However, instead of focusing on the distinction between production and service cooperatives, the authors insist that, “in Kyrgyzstan, [ICA’s] cooperative principles are vaguely understood by the cooperatives members and other stakeholders” (Beishenaly and Namazova
2012, 37). Differently than Lerman and colleagues, Beishenaly and Namazova attribute the cause of this confusion to the fragmentation of information on cooperatives that international actors have brought in the country. Different agencies have promoted different visions of cooperatives in their programmes; as a result, cooperative members have “different understanding of cooperation [and of] their own rules and model of cooperation” (id. 12) and the legislative framework is “a patchwork composed of suggestions from different projects” (id. 14). Beishenaly and Namazova (id. 44) therefore conclude that “it is important to work on the conceptual basis of cooperative organisations, interpret cooperative principles and see to what extent and under what conditions they could be useful for Kyrgyz cooperatives”. This recommendation joins Lerman’s invitation to invest in the improvement of the conceptual understanding of cooperatives. However, Beishenaly and Namazova insist on the need to *adapt* the general principles of cooperation to the specific context of Kyrgyzstan. Furthermore, they identify other causes for the difficulties of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan beyond the problem of “understanding”: they point more precisely than Lerman to concrete and pragmatic challenges, concerning in particular the capitalisation and the expansion of cooperative activities on the market, and suggest concrete measures such as the harmonisation of legislation, the reinforcement of knowledge and research on cooperative experiences and the improvement of financial services for cooperatives (id. 47–56).

### 6.1.3 An influential narrative with weak foundations

Lerman’s work on cooperatives has been influential in shaping scholars’ (in particular agricultural economists’) representations of a persistent “Soviet mentality” that limits the possibilities to develop successful cooperation in ex-socialist countries. Gardner and Lerman’s argument about the “strong psychological resistance to cooperation” is not only repeated with the same phrasing in several publications by Lerman and colleagues (e.g. Lerman 2004, 472; 2013a, 14; Lerman and Sedik 2009a, 16; besides the already mentioned Gardner and Lerman 2006, 5), but also regularly appears in studies on cooperatives and cooperation in ex-socialist countries by other authors (e.g. Lipton 2009, 218; Vidickiene and Gedminaite-Raudone 2012, 8; Atanasova 2014, 26; Theesfeld 2019, 357). At the already mentioned 2016 symposium of agricultural economists in Almaty, Lerman was the main keynote speaker. The idea of a “Soviet legacy” preventing cooperation in the region hovered in presentations and informal chats as unquestioned common sense.

At closer scrutiny, Gardner and Lerman’s statement reveals, however, weak empirical foundations. The phrasing appeared for the first time in a study on land individualisation reforms in Transcaucasia, where Lerman (2004) suggested that service cooperatives could be a solution to the challenges farmers were facing in the new context. *En passant*, Lerman (id. 472) noted that “unfortunately, there is a strong psychological resistance to cooperation bred from years of abuse of the whole concept by socialist regimes” but that, nevertheless, some forms of spontaneous cooperation had emerged after the reforms. In all its occurrences, this opinion is just *stated*: the only “evidence” mentioned in some cases in its support is the quotation of the Plunkett Foundation – a private institution supporting community business in the UK. The quotation only refers to “Central and Eastern Europe”, but is used as evidence for the same
phenomenon in contexts as diverse as Transcaucasia or Central Asia. Furthermore, the quotation stems
from the foundation's "Review of 1994 Activities" – a document not available online and whose
scientific value is questionable.

There are other examples of problematic generalisations in the existing studies on cooperatives in Central Asia. Remember Lerman and Sedik's (2009a, 16) statement about the self-evidence of the benefits of cooperation in transition economies. The authors present some aggregated empirical data in support to this statement for the specific case of Central Asian countries. However, they generalise their regional findings for the totality of "transition economies". In another paper, the same authors analyse aggregated data of land and labour productivity in Kyrgyzstan's agricultural sector and conclude that family farms present the highest productivity there (Lerman and Sedik 2018). They generalise this result as a universal rule of small/medium farms' higher productivity in comparison with larger farms. For this generalisation, they refer to another publication by Lerman (2013a), where he does not provide any reference or empirical evidence for this rule, even if it is a contested rule among economists (see e.g. Jones and Kalmi 2012; de Roest, Ferrari, and Knickel 2018). In yet another paper, Gardner and Lerman (2006) state the universal failure of agricultural production cooperatives worldwide generalising from aggregated data of US cooperatives.

6.1.4 Discussion: a narrative inserted in a developmentalist discourse

The studies reviewed in the previous sections emerged in parallel to the “technical support” by
international actors to Kyrgyzstan’s “transition” from socialism to market economy. In the preface of a
volume collecting his publications on agricultural cooperatives in transition economies, Lerman himself
states that this work was “part of a concerted effort to *provide policy advice* to former Socialist countries
in Europe and Central Asia *in an attempt to help governments navigate the complex transition from
centrally planned to market economy*” (Lerman, Sedik, and Csaki 2016, 5, emphasis added). It is not
surprising, therefore, that these studies emphasise the need to privatise and individualise agriculture as a
way to accelerate the transition towards a market economy. These studies are part of a broader current
that sees cooperatives as means for economic development within market economies (see §2.1.2), and
they therefore understand cooperatives (more specifically *service cooperatives*) as a way to support the
development of a new class of private farmers within a capitalist system. It is also not surprising that, in
this context, these studies insist on the inadequacy and inefficiency of socialist models of production
cooperatives and on the non-compliance of these cooperatives with the principles of member democratic
control and cooperative autonomy; this is indeed a way to mark a neat separation between the old and the
new system aiming to “dissolve the past by the fastest means possible” (Burawoy and Verdery 1999a, 5
see §3.3).

What is problematic here, I argue, are the generalisations and assumptions that underpin these studies.
First, these studies assume that the experience with socialist farms “left a deep imprint on the agriculture
sector and the rural psyche, which has persisted since the beginning of the transition in 1989–1991 to this
day” (Lerman, Sedik, and Csaki 2016, 5): this “imprint” is always negative and concerns the totality of the rural population. Second, the consequence of this “imprint” is always the already discussed “strong psychological resistance to cooperation” in general and for all kinds of cooperation. Third, as a consequence, these studies entirely dismiss the very idea of production cooperatives in favour of service cooperatives – despite the existence of forms of production cooperatives that are successful cooperatives in all respects (e.g. Agarwal 2010, see §2.1.1). Scholars writing on the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan present a precise type of cooperative (service cooperatives of the Western type) as the only “real” cooperative, the only possible form of cooperative. This narrow and rigid definition of what a “real” cooperative should be prevents scholars from seeing other existing forms of cooperation (see §3.1.3) and thus from building their propositions for the improvement of farmers’ livelihoods on these existing forms of cooperation. Given this narrow definition of successful cooperatives, it is obvious that researchers conclude that cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan have failed – a failure based on a narrow definition of success.

This narrow and rigid definition, I suggest, emerges within a broader developmentalist discourse that produces clear hierarchies of knowledge, distinguishing between a knowledge that is considered to count and others that should be dismissed, forgotten, erased. The studies reviewed above often compare cooperative experiences in ex-socialist countries with the ones in the Global North and more or less explicitly make clear that the latter are exemplary and ideal models to be pursued. Remember in particular the “educational effort” suggested by Lerman (2013a, 14–15) to explain the desirable type of cooperative – the *Western* service cooperative – and what is not desirable: production cooperatives as issued from the experience of socialist farming. This kind of paternalistic and homogenising discourse, which creates a neat demarcation between those who know and those who do not know, who should explain and who should learn, is certainly not unique to the case of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan but mirrors the hegemonic discourse on development worldwide denounced by postdevelopment scholars (see Escobar 1995; also Pigg 1992; Cima 2015). In this context, all the imprecisions highlighted in the previous section, I suggest, are less a sign of the questionable scientific methodology of the authors than they are revealing of the homogenising gaze that institutions and several scholars from the Global North tend to have towards ex-socialist regions and their socialist backgrounds.

## 6.2 The narrative of failed cooperatives by the actors promoting them

When I started discussing cooperatives with development workers in Bishkek, I noticed that their narratives resonate with what I read in scholarly literature: both present a similar dismal picture of the situation of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. Development workers present the failure of cooperatives in the country as a fact. They lament that “cooperatives have not functioned” (JICA, unpublished project document) and that too often farmers register in cooperatives just to have access to credit, establishing in this way what many describe as “cooperatives on paper”, or the “fictive cooperatives” denounced by Beishenaly and Namazova (2012). They explain this failure through arguments similar to the ones
discussed in Section 6.1 and identify its cause in a series of “lacks”. For the moment, my aim is not to question whether this failure is actual or not; in this section, I present these “lacks” as they are framed by development workers and governmental actors in Kyrgyzstan in their encounters with a European social scientist.<fnref n="4" />

### 6.2.1 On farmers and “society”: Soviet legacy and laziness

Development workers systematically lament that farmers, but also in general “people” in Kyrgyzstan, “have not understood” the concept and functioning of cooperatives:

> People don't understand the concept of cooperative with the model we propose [the service cooperative], but they mix the idea of cooperative with the idea of the Soviet farm, where everything is put in common and there is no private property. (Baburbek, GIZ, 19.05.2016)

According to development workers, people in Kyrgyzstan lack an understanding of the model of cooperative promoted by development agencies. They usually explain this lack with another lack: a lack of knowledge and education. They also point to the referent of the Soviet farm, insisting that, because of the legacy of the Soviet model of cooperatives, farmers today are not able to understand and apply the new model proposed. For development workers, the confusion between the “old” and the “new” or “modern” cooperative model is problematic in two ways. On the one hand, farmers cannot grasp the new model and thus, in the practical implementation of a cooperative, they include practices and structures of the old model, limiting the effectiveness of the new cooperative. On the other hand, farmers might have a reticence to engage in cooperatives because they fear reproducing a model (the Soviet farm) they do not wish to reproduce:

> People think that the cooperative is like the Soviet farm. They think that the government will take the land and then create the cooperative. But now the land is private, you can join the cooperative without depending on the land of the government and keeping your land. (Sezim, CUK, 09.09.2015)

Here the assumption is triple: that farmers automatically relate cooperatives with Soviet farms; that farmers see the Soviet farm as a means of control by the state and a loss of autonomy; and that farmers do not want to be submitted to this control and lose their autonomy. For development workers, the implication of this lack of understanding is clear: “There is the need to explain to people the concept of cooperative” (Baburbek, GIZ, 19.05.2016). If the problem is that farmers do not grasp the difference between models of cooperatives, the solution is that those who know this difference better should be engaged in explaining it to them. Farmers need “education” about cooperatives; they need to be “convinced” about the clear advantages of modern cooperatives.

Civil servants at all levels reproduce a similar narrative: “Society is not ready yet for cooperation, because people lack the knowledge on how to cooperate” (Kasym, civil servant, *aiyl*, 04.08.2015). Civil

<footnote n="4">⁴ This analysis is mainly based on a dataset of 25 interviews with development workers and governmental actors at national, regional and local levels between 2015 and 2017 and on a set of official documentation collected both online and in person.</footnote>
servants' observation that farmers lack an understanding about cooperatives is usually expressed in vaguer terms than those used by development workers. Civil servants rarely refer to an assumed confusion among farmers between the “old” and the “new” models of cooperatives. Rather, as in the quotation above, they refer to a more general and vague idea of “cooperation”. Like development workers, civil servants insist that farmers need to be convinced of the advantages of cooperation.

Not only among development workers, but also among civil servants and villagers themselves (see Chapter 7), there is a widespread idea that, in Kyrgyzstan, people in general and farmers in particular are lazy. This laziness is often inscribed to a general “mentality” whose characteristics derive from historical processes, in particular the legacy of 70 years of Soviet regime in the country:

> We had 70 years of Soviet Union and things cannot be changed fast. I advise people to follow the rules of cooperatives, but after 70 years of Soviet Union, now we need time to change things. The problem is that back then the government was doing everything, it was doing the plan [for production]. People didn't have to do anything, because everything was already ready for them. Now things have changed, but people think the same, for instance that the cooperative will do everything and therefore they don't have self-initiative. People don't want to invest in the cooperative: they don't invest but they wait for support. (Sezim, CUK, 09.09.2015)

In this narrative, the “legacy” from the Soviet experience is a habit of passively waiting for someone else to take care of one’s own business and life. If under the Soviet regime this “someone” was the Soviet state or the Soviet farm, now farmers expect the cooperative – intended as an external entity – to care for and organise their economic activities. Sezim concludes:

> People are lazy. [...] Everything for them should be organised and given. But now you have to think by yourself, you have to develop your own skills, be informed. The world is changing and you need to change too. But here people don't want to do anything. (Sezim, CUK, 09.09.2015)

In this view, farmers' failure is the failure to adapt to the new system – a system that requires individual entrepreneurship, to assume responsibility for one's own life and business and to overcome the expectation that someone else will do it instead. This lack of adaptation to the new structural conditions is deeper than the lack of understanding outlined above and requires a transformation that is more profound than just learning the practical terms of a new cooperative model. In this sense, development workers and civil servants sometimes conclude that “society” in Kyrgyzstan is not yet rife for the new model of cooperatives and that efforts to promote knowledge about this model might not suffice for its successful implementation. This is one of the justifications for the decreasing interest of development agencies for the direct promotion of cooperatives as a form of organisation among Kyrgyzstani farmers.

### 6.2.2 On governmental actors: contradictions and failed promises

According to development workers, not only farmers lack an understanding of the new model of cooperative, but also governmental actors:
The first problem is that there isn't a clear definition of what a cooperative is. Neither in the law, nor among people. Even at the ministry level people don't have a clear understanding of what a cooperative really is. (Talant, JICA, 13.07.2016)

For many development workers, the confusion in legislation mirrors thus the confusion of governmental actors about the precise terms of the new cooperative model. The reason for this confusion among governmental actors is similar as for farmers: the persistence of the Soviet farm as the reference for cooperatives:

> For instance, when government VIPs visit the Issyk-Kul, they usually praise Oktjabr's<fnref n="5" /> achievements and indicate it as an example to follow. The problem is that Oktjabr is a production cooperative and it isn't how a cooperative should be. Praising Oktjabr is a contradiction of the policies in place, because Oktjabr is not the model of cooperative the government says it wants to promote. (Talant, JICA, 13.07.2016)

Development workers lament that the lack of understanding among farmers is also a consequence of the lack of understanding among governmental actors, who transmit contradictory messages about the type of cooperative that should be promoted.

Among the concrete measures for the promotion of cooperatives promised in governmental strategies since the mid-2000s and especially during Bakiev's mandate (2005–2010) are the improvement of the regulatory framework of cooperatives through the harmonisation of legal documents; the exemption of cooperatives from the VAT tax and the clarification of cooperative taxation; the preferential access to financial and credit services for cooperatives, especially for the leasing of agricultural machinery; and the development of knowledge and diffusion of information about cooperatives through information campaigns in villages through the development of specific training programmes in collaboration with local universities.<fnref n="6" /> Development actors, however, denounce that most of these measures have never been realised, especially because the central government lacks financial and human resources for their implementation.

Interestingly, civil servants at the local level join development workers in lamenting that the central government promised but never realised concrete measures for the promotion of cooperatives:

> The plan [for the development of the agricultural sector] is there, but to implement it we need financing. The plan was proposed at the national level, but we didn't receive the budget to implement it. (Jibek, civil servant, oblast, 02.09.2015)

Remember that local governmental bodies depend on budget allocations from the central government; only the ayil can count on their own revenues, which are paltry (see § 3.1.1). Local civil servants thus complain that they have received several plans for promoting cooperatives from the central government, which include measures that should be implemented directly by local bodies. However, the allocation of

<footnote n="5">⁵ Oktjabr is the ex-Soviet farm now turned into production cooperative, introduced in Chapter 5.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ See the *Concept of Agricultural Cooperative System Development in the Kyrgyz Republic for 2015–2017* (Government of the Kyrgyz Republic 2014).</footnote>
responsibilities for the promotion of cooperatives is not accompanied by a parallel allocation of resources, leaving local civil servants with plans they are not able to implement.

If several development workers recognise the budget difficulties of the central government as a justification for its limited engagement in promoting cooperatives, others go further in their critique of the government's inactivity and maintain that the main problem is government's passivity and lack of will:

> The Kyrgyz government is really doing very little: not only for cooperatives but in general for the development of the country. It's true that it doesn't have many resources, but the problem is that it's really difficult to work here with such a passive government. (Bob, UN, 12.07.2017)

Even if the government would have enough resources to implement the promised measures, its passivity would limit their actual implementation. Sezim brings several examples to show that, even if resources were available, governmental actors would lack the will to actually realise measures in favour of cooperatives. Since the government does not have a coherent strategic vision for the development of cooperatives in the country, Sezim has tried to lobby for such a strategic vision. She explains:

> I even did the job that should be done by the government and wrote myself a strategic plan for cooperatives. I tried to promote this plan among different people in the government, saying 'Here! You don't have to do anything: it's already ready!' But the government has no interest and until now it didn't do anything with my plan. (Sezim, CUK, 09.09.2015)

Sezim often complains that civil servants do not understand the concept of the cooperative. Since I know that JICA offers training sessions on cooperatives to civil servants, I ask her whether these training sessions are helping in solving this problem. She replies:

> It has been more than 10 years that JICA organises these workshops and even pays the trip to Japan. But it's nothing worth, people just go there like in a *kurort* [health resort]! They go for holidays and don't care about the contents of the workshop! (Sezim, CUK, 01.09.2016)

Later in the same interview, I tell Sezim that I heard from a civil servant that the administration of his *rayon* is organising training sessions on cooperatives for farmers and I ask her whether this could be a positive sign of some activism by local bodies. She replies:

> That's nonsense! It's a lie! You see, that's typical of the government: they say they do this and that to promote cooperatives, they want to take the merit, to praise themselves. But in fact they don't do anything! (Sezim, CUK, 01.09.2016)

Sezim laments that the government does not listen to her advice on cooperatives and explains this lack of interest as due to the general passivity of civil servants – a legacy, according to her, of the Soviet experience. She also complains repeatedly that civil servants not only are not interested in the development of their country, but also that they lack any kind of competence and knowledge about the issues for which they are responsible. Again, she attributes this situation to the typical passivity of the Soviet citizen. Furthermore, she complains that not only civil servants are lazy and passive, but even that they praise themselves for achievements they did not contribute to realising. Her vision of governmental actors (a vision shared by several development workers) is thus discouraging. If, for the moment, I cannot
confirm that Kyrgyzstani in general lack trust in institutions, it is at least clear that development workers
have no trust nor hope in governmental institutions.

6.2.3 On the Cooperative Union of Kyrgyzstan: “doing remont”

CUK's general aim is to create and maintain a favourable environment for cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. In particular, firstly, CUK represents the interests of cooperatives in the country. It engages in lobbying addressed to the national government, suggesting policies and measures in support to cooperatives. One of the results of such lobbying activities is the recent establishment of a training centre on cooperatives within the Kyrgyz National Agricultural University in Bishkek in 2019. Second, CUK delivers training sessions on cooperatives as part of training packages within the rural development programmes of aid agencies. Third, when development agencies look for partners for their projects, they sometimes refer to CUK to identify existing cooperatives or farmer groups to include in their projects. Usually this collaboration comprises small interventions like the renovation of buildings or the installation of irrigation infrastructure. Fourth, member cooperatives or potential cooperatives can solicit individual advice from CUK. Fifth, CUK serves sometimes as an intermediary between producers and buyers. Sixth, a microfinance fund is linked to CUK and grants credits to member cooperatives, who can also refer to the Fund for Guarantee and Stabilisation, established by the GIZ and linked to CUK, as a collateral to obtain loans from other banks. Finally, in the last few years, CUK has been active in positioning Kyrgyzstan in the cooperative movement in Asia. CUK officially joined the Asia and Pacific section of ICA in 2018 and, in collaboration with it, regularly organises and takes part to international meetings and forums on cooperatives.

Although CUK is actively engaged in all these activities, the CUK director herself laments that they remain limited in their actual scope. Along with some development workers, she notes that there is a gap between CUK's planned goals and activities and the resources available to realise them:

Our resources are very limited: I’m alone working for CUK and I have a lot of things to do.
Most of the time I’m in the field visiting cooperatives and doing some kind of *remont*<fnref n="7" /> there.
When I’m in Bishkek, most of the time I have meetings with ministries for lobbying, or
banks, or international organisations. My time in the office is very limited. (Sezim, CUK,
01.09.2016)

As Sezim explains, direct consultancy to member cooperatives is more about urgent necessities than about strategic visions. The link between buyers and farmers producers supported by CUK is always precarious, and the limited capital of the microfinance fund does not allow to offer advantageous credit conditions. CUK remains dependent on the financial support of foreign agencies, accorded either as donations or as a payment for the services of consultancy and training sessions offered by CUK. CUK's budget can hardly cover the salary of the director, the only employee, whereas activity-specific expenses are usually covered by foreign sponsors.

<footnote n="7">⁷ Here intended as “troubleshooting”.</footnote>
6.2.4 Discussion: building a hierarchy of knowledge and experience

As one could expect, the actors introduced in the previous paragraphs tend to attribute the responsibility for the limited success of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan to others and rarely to themselves. Whereas all actors analysed above attribute several lacks to farmers and people in general, development workers also attribute similar lacks to governmental actors. At the same time, actors that are directly responsible for the implementation of concrete measures for the promotion of cooperatives (in particular CUK and local civil servants) justify their partial realisation with the lack of economic resources: the responsibility for this lack is usually externalised to other actors (the central government in particular).

The attentive reader has probably noted that none of the sections above was dedicated to development agencies – one of the main actors of the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. This is because the narratives I collected almost never attribute a responsibility nor lack to development agencies. Only Beishenaly and Namazova (2012, see §6.1.2) express a critical concern about the fragmentation of the promotion of cooperatives – a fragmentation that, according to them, increases the confusion lamented by several actors about the concept of cooperative. Besides Beishenaly and Namazova, only Talant (JICA) raises some concerns about the diminishing interest of international donors in promoting cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. In any case, no intellectual or motivational lack is ever attributed to development agencies in this context. I suggest that this is due to the specific way in which the dominant discourse on cooperatives values and creates a hierarchy between different types of knowledge. In fact, a lack is always defined in the negative with reference to a positive term. What is missing then? What is the positive term?

“True” and “fake” cooperatives

When discussing the current situation in Kyrgyzstan, development workers – both orally and in written documentation – often refer to the publications presented in Section 6.1. Following these studies, they usually see in the strengthening of small to medium-size family farming the key for the development of Kyrgyzstan’s agricultural sector: service cooperatives are proposed as a tool for developing the sector in this direction. Similar to the literature, development actors present the service cooperative model in opposition to the production cooperative model, which they perceive as an obstacle to this development. Based on this and on the triple assumption about the Soviet referent discussed above, it is understandable that development actors try to distance the cooperative concept they propose from the assumedly negative model of the Soviet farm as much as possible, and that they underline that establishing a cooperative today is not a return to Soviet farms.

Indeed, development workers often emphasise that Soviet cooperatives were not “true” cooperatives: “The Soviet cooperative in fact was artificial cooperation; it wasn’t genuine, not voluntary and people were forced into the collective farm, which was controlled by the government” (Gulperi, Bio-KG, 08.09.2015). Development workers often underline the problems of the Soviet model. First of all, they associate the Soviet cooperative model with a top-down form of governance, where decision-making, ownership and control over land, infrastructure, but also labour, were strictly in the hand of a centralised
power (farm leaders, party representatives or more generally the Soviet state). In their vision the Soviet farm means anti-democratic governance and a centralised control over the means of production. Comparing these characteristics with ICA's cooperative principles, they insist that the Soviet model promoted "artificial cooperation" and that Soviet farms were "fake" or "pseudo-cooperatives" (see Theesfeld 2019, see §2.2.1). Similarly, they also insist that ex-Soviet farms that registered as cooperatives after Kyrgyzstan's independence (like Oktjabr) are not "true" cooperatives. Referring to these cooperatives, which maintain collective production activities and often use the same infrastructure of the former Soviet farm, Sezim explains:

> In [this] type of cooperatives, the management is top-down. There is no communication between management and members, no transparency about the profit. All decisions are taken by the management and members have no voice in decision-making. The management is also inherited by the Soviet Union, they are the same people... and it has the same top-down style. Therefore members don't have trust in the management, which takes the money for itself and doesn't invest in the cooperative. (Sezim 09.09.2015)

Such cooperatives are thus considered to be “fake” cooperatives that have inherited the problems of Soviet farms, including a tendency to corruption and mismanagement by leaders.

In direct contrast to this model, development workers insist on the ICA's principles of voluntary membership and democratic member control and emphasise that the model of “modern” cooperatives they propose is built on democratic governance: “members have a voice in the decision-making; there is transparency on the profits and equal voice for all members who decide freely to join the cooperative” (Sezim, CUK, 09.09.2015). In this narrative, thus, members of “modern” cooperatives freely decide to join the cooperative and directly control decision-making, whereas members of Soviet cooperatives (but also of current production cooperatives like Oktjabr) were forced to join the cooperative and did not have voice in control and management of the cooperative. Development workers also emphasise that in modern cooperatives, members remain in control of land, which is kept in private property by the individual members.

## Defining the “true” cooperative within the developmentalist discourse

While distancing the “modern” model from the Soviet model, development workers tend to distance the “modern” model also from the model of production cooperatives in general, merging the definition of “old” or “Soviet” cooperatives with the definition of production cooperatives *per se* (probably also because the only examples of production cooperatives in the country are ex-Soviet farms like Oktjabr). As a consequence, production cooperatives become *per se* “fake” cooperatives, although they are integral part of the cooperative tradition worldwide (see §2.1.1). It is important to note that, in principle, ownership of the means of production in production cooperatives can be both private or collective and that, as in the other cooperatives, democratic member control remains a basic principle (see Table 2.2). Development workers thus do not limit themselves to proposing service cooperatives as a tool for the development of Kyrgyzstan’s agricultural sector; they also insist that this is the *only* cooperative model
that should be applied. They produce thus a neat opposition between the service cooperative model and the production cooperative model, as is the case also in the literature discussed above (§6.1). The first model (the “new”, “modern” model) becomes thus an expression of modernity and progress; the second (the “old” model) represents backwardness and being stuck in the past. I am not suggesting here that production cooperatives would be a better or even the best model for farmers in Kyrgyzstan and that they should be promoted there. What I want to underline is that this narrative silences existing or possible alternative forms of collective organisation beside the service cooperative model.

I argue that the narrative of failure is a consequence of this specific framing of cooperative models. Remember that Lerman and Sedik (2014) found that all cooperatives surveyed their study in Kyrgyzstan included forms of collective production; the authors therefore concluded that no “pure” service cooperatives existed in the country. Even in the case that these cooperatives would comply with all ICA’s principles and improve farmers’ livelihoods, they could never be considered “true” cooperatives within the dominant framing of development workers and agricultural economists; they can only be considered as “failed”.

Since the “true” cooperative model is the one proposed by development actors, it is clear that development actors have the widest and most precise knowledge about it. It is in this context that the “lacks” discussed above (especially the lack of knowledge and understanding) are to be understood. By framing the service cooperative model as the only “right” one, the dominant discourse does not only silence possible alternatives but also creates a hierarchy between the “correct” knowledge of development actors and the “wrong” knowledge of everyday “people” – reproducing the typical developmentalist discourse noted above. Such categorisations are deeply disempowering for the second category, which is always defined in the negative, as *lacking* something (development, the right knowledge) and whose knowledge and experience are dismissed as useless – or even prejudicial – for achieving what it lacks.

Furthermore, I suggest that the exaggeration of the divide between service and production cooperatives contributes to increasing the confusion about cooperatives that development actors lament. Although the latter insist that only “pure” service cooperatives are “true” cooperatives, neither the cooperatives established through their intervention nor the ones accepted as CUK members correspond to this ideal. In fact, even the few ex-Soviet farms turned cooperatives still existing in the country – so strongly criticised by development workers, including the CUK director – are accepted as CUK members because, as its director herself notes, these actors are too powerful to refuse.

One of the direct consequences of the narrative of failure is donors' diminished interest in the promotion of cooperatives in the country. For instance, a World Bank report already stated in 2009, “Pressure for the rapid creation and development of cooperatives may also be counterproductive. Such institutions need to develop independently and internally, led by their members, and this requires time and may not provide quick solutions” (Guadagni and Fileccia 2009, 19). Since “society is not ready for cooperation”, donors conclude that the promotion of cooperatives is a project that cannot be successful. They also conclude that it is necessary to first have a favourable environment for cooperatives and to leave the wish to
establish cooperatives to farmers themselves. However, given the limited capacities of CUK and of the government to provide such an environment, it remains questionable whether this could ever happen.

**6.3 Development actors: renegotiating cooperatives and development**

The observation of the CUK director above about the inclusion of ex-Soviet farms turned cooperatives as members of CUK is a glimpse into the everyday negotiations that make up the concrete situated landscape of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. Until now, I have presented “development actors” as a nearly uniform category that defends and promotes a precise model of cooperative corresponding to a common ideal. If it is true that the narrative of failure is common to the discourse most development actors produce in their interactions with me, the category of development actors is itself fragmented and ambiguous: it is therefore important to differentiate between the actors within this category and to acknowledge and analyse the internal differentiations.

**6.3.1 Differentiations in the narratives of individual development actors**

The two institutions that have engaged in promoting cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan the most (German GIZ and Japanese JICA) refer to the long tradition of cooperatives in their respective countries of origin. Although the basic principles are the same, the specific characteristics of cooperatives vary in the two traditions, however. In particular, German cooperatives evolved mainly from savings cooperatives supporting rural entrepreneurship, whereas in Japan the cooperative movement emerged from consumer cooperatives. Both agencies, as well as the other agencies active in the promotion of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan, have thus built on different cooperative traditions in their respective country of origin. This is visible, for instance, in the current legislation on cooperatives, where different passages carry the marks of the agency that collaborated in drafting the texts (see Beishenaly and Namazova 2012 above). For instance, an important difference between the German and the Japanese models is that cooperatives are considered commercial organisations in the former model, but non-commercial organisations in the latter. Because of their limited time frame, projects' endeavour to harmonise legislation has been always partial: different projects by different agencies have focused on modifying specific passages of legislation without being able to revise all legislation concerning cooperatives. The fact that most training modules on cooperatives within rural development programmes are currently provided by CUK contributes to maintaining a certain coherence in the information farmers receive. Nevertheless, development workers seem to ignore the variety of possible cooperative models when they rigidly define what a “true” cooperative is.

Despite these different referents for the ideal cooperative model, the concrete measures implemented by development agencies for the promotion of cooperatives have been similar. The programmes aiming explicitly at the promotion of cooperatives encouraged formally registering cooperatives through incentives such as facilitating access to credit and providing information and administrative support for
the process of registration. As noted, measures for the support and development of already existing cooperatives were usually missing in these programmes. The focus on formalisation was probably also motivated by the need for concrete indicators for projects to guarantee accountability towards donors. This focus has been regarded critically by some development agencies, whose programmes have encouraged the formation of farmer groups around a specific concrete interest without insisting on their formalisation as cooperatives (see Schmidt 2012). Even among the main promoters of formalised cooperation, there is no unanimity about the advisability of a focus on formalisation. An interview with three GIZ collaborators (19.05.2016) shows this clearly. The interview was planned with Baburbek, a Kyrgyz in his fifties who worked for the agency at the time of a project on cooperatives. Two young female colleagues, Nazgul and Elvira, also Kyrgyz, joined the interview to help with translation, since Baburbek does not speak English and my Russian is insecure.

During the interview, Baburbek insists on the need for farmer groups to register as formal cooperatives: this would provide them advantages for access to credit but also for marketing their produce in larger amounts. He explains the limited success of cooperatives with the typical narrative of lack: farmers “lack awareness about the calculation of costs and benefits”, they have only a “short-term reference”, are “lazy” and “grant-oriented”. Nazgul translates Baburbek’s reflections, but, at one moment, she stops and starts a discussion with him, questioning the actual advantages of formal registration. After discussing with Baburbek, she summarises her position for me. She thinks that for farmers it is easier, and often even more advantageous, to sell alone at the local market: transaction costs and the administrative burden are lower, and the revenue – even if smaller – is immediate. She compares the situation with Germany, where in order to sell at the market one needs an authorisation and where, therefore, it is convenient to register in formal groups. When the interview with Baburbek is over, I remain alone with Elvira, who works on a project on organic farming. Like Baburbek, she insists on the necessity of formalisation: the certification of organic products implies a strict control of the production process, she explains, and formal cooperatives can provide this control. This scene suggests that the position of individual development workers about the specific focus of the promotion of cooperatives can vary even within the same organisation and that, when it comes to concrete measures, no uniform “ideal” of cooperative exists even among development workers.

Finally, there are some exceptions to the dominant narrative by development workers that defines service cooperatives as the only true cooperatives. I meet a few development workers – all Kyrgyz men over fifty – who seem not to be deeply convinced about this definition. For instance, a retired local project worker explicitly argues for the need to increase the average plot size by joining farmers’ production activities. Baburbek, the GIZ employee of the previous paragraph, insists on the need to promote service cooperatives and that production cooperatives are not suited for Kyrgyzstan because the “Kyrgyz mentality” is not suited to this model. The “lack argument” emerges again, but in a different form than above. In fact, Baburbek personally sees production cooperatives as a superior form of farm organisation. As referents for this argument, he explicitly mentions the production cooperatives of the Soviet Union and of East Germany, which cultivated large land surfaces and could compete with West German
enterprises. He also mentions, at the same time, large private agri-business enterprises in Western Europe and North America as successful examples of farm organisation. For Baburbek, being able to handle large surfaces of land and possessing all the necessary agricultural machines are the criteria to define the success of farm enterprises. Baburbek argues that Russians and Germans have a stronger attitude towards cooperation than Kyrgyz people. To confirm this, he reminds me that most of the big production cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan are managed by ethnic Russians. On the contrary, “Kyrgyz don’t unite” and are less keen to collaboration. Such an argument is not common among development workers; however, as we will see below and in the next chapter, it is widespread among farmers as well as among some governmental actors.

### 6.3.2 Discussion: situating the narratives of individual development actors

Baburbek's argument above suggests that specific narratives on cooperatives emerge from specific relations in specific places and moments in time. Although I could not engage long enough with individual development workers to be able to grasp in detail their personal trajectories and lifeworlds, in this section I present some glimpses of how their narratives emerge from their specific position within the development sector and from their specific interaction with me as a social scientist from Europe.

**Baburbek: navigating ambiguous models of modernity**

Baburbek explicitly states that the criteria to define a successful farm enterprise include its size and its endowment with agricultural machinery; he refers here to both large Soviet farms and private capitalist agri-businesses. Both these models – despite their oppositions – embody the vision of modernity as the technological domination of nature or, in the specific case of agriculture, as its mechanisation and concentration in large enterprises. The Soviet model of modernity is well known among Kyrgyzstani citizens, especially those of Baburbek's generation who have experienced Soviet modernist propaganda in the first person. The examples of Western European, North American but also later Russian or Kazakhstani large agri-business enterprises have been equally well known in Kyrgyzstan at least since the 1990s. Not only do the mass media regularly present images of such big enterprises abroad – foreign development or commercial agencies also spread this image, for instance when they invite local development workers, civil servants or businesspeople for trips abroad to visit successful examples of farming enterprises. Simultaneously, however, some of these same agencies promote service cooperatives in support of small farmers in the country, i.e. a form of agriculture that does not correspond to this idea of development and modernity. As already discussed, in the narrative of these agencies, service cooperatives are the “correct” form of cooperatives to be promoted in Kyrgyzstan while production cooperatives are blamed as inefficient and undemocratic.

Baburbek seems well aware of this narrative on cooperatives and, when speaking with me (probably associating me with expat workers whom he knows well), he praises service cooperatives and laments the various lacks that limit the success of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. At the same time, however, he
explicitly affirms his ideal of large-scale farming, which seems to contradict his narrative on cooperatives. As a way to navigate the contradiction between the promotion of small-scale farming and his ideal of large-scale enterprises, Baburbek develops an “ethnic” explanation: the “Kyrgyz mentality” prevents the realisation of the ideal model. In this way, the negative pole of the hierarchical categorisation between “modern” and “backward” is strengthened and even assumes an ethnic (and essentialising) colouration. I am not suggesting here that Baburbek is fully making up this narrative for me without believing in it; what I am suggesting is that this specific narrative emerges in a particular situated context through specific contingent relations.

***Nazgul and Elvira: emancipation through development work?***

The interview with the three GIZ collaborators is interesting also for what it reveals about the relation of the two young women to their older male colleague. In Kyrgyzstan, strong hierarchies based on gender and age (among other things) shape social relations (see Chapter 9). Young women rarely contradict older men. The fact that Nazgul starts a discussion with Baburbek during our interview is unexpected and surprising for me. This might be a sign of the emancipation of young women through development work noted in Section 3.2.2 (see in particular Féaux de la Croix 2013). By questioning not only Baburbek’s statement, but also the policy of her employer, Nazgul gives a glimpse into the opportunities for emancipation that a career in the development sector opens up to young women in Kyrgyzstan.

Elvira, on the contrary, remains silent during the whole interview. When we are left alone, her explanations of the role of cooperatives for organic farming is imbued with development terminology – for instance the need to focus on “institutional development” and to increase the “social responsibility of farmers”. It seems that Elvira is able to mobilise a specific language of development that allows her to maintain her position within the development sector – and to legitimise this position in front of me. At least in the framework of the interview, she does not question the assumptions and arguments implied by this language. This hints to Pétric’s (2013, see §3.2.2) observation that Kyrgyzstani development workers have adapted to the schemata proposed (or imposed) by international organisations.

***Sezim: building hierarchies of knowledge***

My meetings with Sezim (and non-meetings, i.e. the several times she declined my invitations to meet) are also revealing of the individual strategies development workers put in place to navigate the development sector.<fnref n="8" /> Sezim, an ethnic Kyrgyz in her fifties, worked for GIZ in the cooperative project before becoming the director of CUK. Among the development workers I meet, she is one who produces the strongest hierarchy between the definition of “true” cooperatives and the lack of understanding by farmers and governmental actors. In her statements, she emphasises this through emotions that range from disillusion and discomfort to rancour and anger. She depicts herself as one of the few persons who have

<footnote n="8">⁸ Also in Sezim’s case, I did not have the possibility to investigate more in detail her personal history and professional trajectory.</footnote>
really understood what a cooperative is and almost the only one who engages actively to support cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. She blames ministries for not responding positively to her lobbying activities. She complains that farmers have still not grasped the concept of cooperatives, that they are and are lazy and passive, looking only for immediate gains – and she accuses their Soviet past for these attitudes. She also complains about the limited resources available to CUK and about the burden of work she bears, with little recognition by others, to support cooperatives.

Sezim refuses my invitation to collaborate more closely and justifies her refusal with the fact that she is
too busy with her work. This is surely true, given the lack of personnel at CUK discussed above. Perhaps,
however, other factors play a role in her refusal. Maybe my identity as a social scientist interested in
learning about cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan is not immediately understandable for Sezim: she is probably
used to expats who come to Kyrgyzstan to *explain* what a cooperative is on the basis of experiences in the
Global North, not the way around.<fnref n="9" /> Maybe Sezim is so much trapped in her fantasy of an unrealisable
desire prevented by a series of scapegoats (the lack of understanding of the government, the passivity of
farmers, the lack of resources from donors) that she is incapable of “passing to the act” (Healy 2010, 503,
see §4.3.1).

What is sure, however, is that Sezim bases her position as CUK director on a developmentalist discourse
that values her own knowledge (and that of few others) and blames all others – the ones who do not
support, understand, or collaborate with her. Or, at least, this is the identity she performs when meeting a
European social scientist interested in the topic of cooperatives. It is important to notice that I only have
rare second-hand information on the content of Sezim’s training sessions on cooperatives. Although I
suggested participating in such training sessions in which both Sezim and farmers who I knew would be
in attendance, they always avoided inviting me. When I asked Sezim or these farmers to tell me the
details of the training, nobody ever gave me clear explanations, and their answers always remained vague.
I also could find nowhere written material from these training sessions: Sezim always refused to share it
with me, and the farmers I met who had participated in such training sessions claimed that they could not
find the material anymore. It is possible, thus, that the content of training sessions is different from the
vision of cooperatives that Sezim shares with me: maybe, like Baburbek, Sezim has integrated the habit
of praising service cooperatives and blaming production cooperatives when speaking to expats, but when
talking to farmers she is less rigid in her definitions – and does not want me to see this ambiguity.

Roku: *building local knowledge through academic and grey literature*

During a lunch with Roku, a young Japanese woman (05.07.2017), she describes with pride a programme
for school meals for children promoted by the UN development agency for which she works. She
explains that, when the organisation started the project, its collaborators noticed a lack of trust among
villagers and a lack of “community-building activities”. As a way to build trust and a strong sense of

<footnote n="9">⁹ See also the reaction of Stanislav to my proposition to work with his cooperative (Chapter 7).</footnote>
community, the project decided that the families had to contribute to their children's meals at school either financially or by bringing food. Making the link with agricultural cooperatives, Roku underlines that one of the reasons for their limited success is a similar lack of trust among villagers, which reduces their willingness to join a group of farmers, but also a lack of trust in formal institutions in a context where – she emphasises – leaders often divert material contributions to collectives' activities for their own private purposes. Roku's argument that trust among villagers and community ties are lacking in Kyrgyzstani villages clashes with my experience as an adopted villager in Pjak, where I could personally experience the strong social ties that shape the everyday life of local communities (see Chapter 9).

Roku explains that she came to Kyrgyzstan only a few months before, without much previous knowledge about the country. As her colleagues, she is used to short-term assignments (two to three years), after which she moves to another country and another programme. The amount of work required of her current position is quite large; she notes that she does not have the time to study the local context deeply, but she is trying to build up regional knowledge through existing reports and studies. Indeed, during our lunch she often explicitly refers to the FAO-commissioned studies by Lerman and colleagues. These studies, as discussed above, often point to the lack of trust as a reason for the limited success of community development initiatives in ex-socialist countries of CEE and the FSU. For Roku and her colleagues, this reading not only provides a simple explanation for the difficulties encountered by their project in village communities, it also offers a simple answer to these difficulties and a source of legitimation for the activities – and the approach – promoted by their project. Whether other kinds of cooperation practices and community ties actually exist in Kyrgyzstani villages remains unknown for the project collaborators – and, in the end, not relevant for their mandate.

## 6.4 Governmental actors: navigating ambiguity

When speaking with civil servants and local authorities, one can quickly understand why development workers complain about their big promises not followed by concrete deeds. My interviews with governmental actors are often frustrating: I have the feeling that my interlocutors put in place a series of strategies to avoid answering my questions. Many of these interviews are in fact long monologues in which my interlocutor explains in general and vague terms the government's plans to support farmers, for instance through the establishment of cooperatives. Whenever I try to ask more precise details about the concrete measures that are planned or already implemented, the reaction is usually either some further vague monologues or blatant diversions of topics.<fnref n="10" /> Another strategy consists in mixing Kyrgyz (which I barely understand) and Russian (which I understand), to leave no time to my interpreter to translate neither my questions nor the answers and to interrupt her translation and start speaking about another topic. Most of the times, I cannot obtain anything deeper than these general statements.

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ One can observe this same strategy by governmental representatives on other occasions, for instance during community meetings when the audience starts asking questions to and raising demands of the government.</footnote>
Only in rare occasions, after insisting for a long time to have more concrete information, my interlocutor finally admits that the local administration does not have enough resources to implement the planned measures and that, if any, some measures are implemented by development agencies. An interview with Nurlan, a civil servant at *ayil* level, is a good example of this:

Nurlan: The [governmental] strategy 2010–2015 [on the promotion of cooperatives] included the diffusion of information on cooperatives to people in order to convince them to establish cooperatives. [...]

Ottavia: What concrete activities were realised in the framework of this strategy at the *aiyl* level?

Nurlan: We provided information to people. We provided to people flyers and brochures with information about the establishment of cooperatives. In the flyers are explained all pro and contra, advantages and disadvantages of cooperatives. [...] (Nurlan, *aiyl*, 04.09.2015)

This conversation takes place in Nurlan’s office in the *aiyl* administration building – an office he shares with several colleagues but which, however, is rarely full, often leaving us the opportunity to sit alone with the interpreter. His desk is tidy and quite empty: his piles of papers are hidden in the drawers. Some of them are also stored in an old, small fridge, which now serves as a shelf and, equipped with a padlock, also as a safe. While explaining the information-sharing activities on cooperatives mentioned in the extract above, Nurlan starts rummaging in his drawers, then opens the fridge with a key and continues his search there. He is looking for the flyers and brochures he is talking about but cannot find them. He gives me some flyers he finds in the fridge, but they are not the ones he was looking for. He comments that they had a lot of flyers but probably they have distributed all of them. The flyers are advertisements of foreign private companies for agricultural machines, with pictures of big tractors and combines (Fig. 3). I continue the conversation:

Ottavia: Who produced the flyers you distributed? [...]

Nurlan: The flyers are delivered at the workshops. There are flyers from NGOs and from the organisers of the workshops. We [the local administration] don’t have enough budget for developing our own flyers. (Nurlan, *aiyl*, 04.09.2015)

This conversation seems to confirm that governmental actors tend to overstate their deeds and to assume the merit for activities they did not contribute to realise. Nurlan, however, notes the other side of the coin: he complains that, sometimes, when development organisations conduct training sessions or other activities in the village, they do not inform the local administration, which feels “bypassed” and delegitimised. Indeed, local administrations have to rely on external resources (usually from foreign donors) to implement their plans: the risk is that external actors take over the tasks of the local administration, which, as a consequence, becomes even more invisible to villagers – giving them one more reason to complain about a government that “doesn’t do anything”. In the next sections I unpack the strategies of governmental actors – again, recognising their plurality and individuality – to navigate this ambiguity.
6.4.1 Meanings of cooperatives

Speaking with governmental actors also seems to confirm that their knowledge and understanding about cooperatives are very limited. When I ask details about the precise type of cooperatives they intend to promote, my interlocutors usually put in place similar avoidance strategies as the ones described above. When they do engage in some more specific explanations, it is clear that my question has a different meaning for them. Emerging from my background readings on cooperatives, my question is directed to understand the kind of internal governance, member activities and ownership relations, among others, that governmental actors imagine for the cooperatives they wish to have in the country. For my interlocutors, however, these categories do not seem to be pertinent to my question. Two moments in particular clarify this misunderstanding.

The first moment occurs during the same interview with Nurlan quoted above (04.09.2015). After he states the local government's willingness to promote cooperatives, I ask him which specific type of cooperatives he has in mind. Elzada, the interpreter, translates the question but Nurlan does not understand it. I try to clarify my question mentioning that there can be different types of cooperatives according, for instance, to their internal governance, to the kind of ownership relations or to member tasks. What follows is a chaotic conversation between Nurlan, Elzada and me. Elzada discusses my question with Nurlan, trying to clarify it further; Nurlan gives an answer, which Elzada translates back to me; not happy with the answer, I try to reformulate the question to Elzada, who translates it back to Nurlan; Nurlan, again, starts discussing with Elzada, trying to understand the meaning of my question, then gives another answer. This loop repeats itself several times.

I am not satisfied with Nurlan's answers because they do not address the typical criteria with which scholars and development workers define different types of cooperatives. I receive no information from Nurlan about internal governance, ownership structure or member activities. He does not mention the need for democratic governance or centralised control, of private or collective ownership, of collective production or marketing activities. In his answers, Nurlan mentions what for me are random examples of private business activities: a slaughtering house built by a man in the nearby village, which now provides jobs to villagers; private investors who came to the village and invested in some business; a foreign organisation that sponsored the renovation of some public building in the village.

The second moment is an interview with Nadyrbek (01.09.2015), who is responsible for the agricultural sector at the rayon administration. Again, when he states that his office has plans to promote cooperatives, I ask which type of cooperatives is envisioned. It is worth quoting an extensive passage from this interview, because it is revealing for the point I want to make in this section. Nadyrbek replies to my question:

> There are two ways of developing a cooperative. First, each household owns a plot of land. They organise together, for example fifteen households, in one cooperative. In average, every household owns one to two hectares of land, but the size is not equal for each household. The people who join the cooperative should pay a membership fee proportional to the land size they own. The profit of the cooperative is shared among the members
according to the size of the land. The second type are farmer unions that already exist. They have already big plots, around twenty to thirty hectares for one union. If they can show good results, they can acquire more land from the public land, they can even buy it. In this way they can become bigger and enlarge the union. The idea is to join existing farmers unions, so that you will have even bigger unions. (Nadyrbek, 01.09.2015)

I ask some more details about the difference between the two types of cooperatives. Nadyrbek further explains:

The difference between the first and the second type is that the first are private households owning a land share. These cooperatives are small. The land usually is small, also the membership fee should be small, for example just a cow. Since they are small households with small land plots, this kind of cooperative will grow slower. For the second type, these are cooperatives that already have big land, machines, experience. The fee can also be higher and they can grow faster. (Nadyrbek, 01.09.2015)

In order to better understand the distinction, I ask Nadyrbek to put two cooperatives we both know in one of the two categories. Ak-Bulut, Kumbat's cooperative in Pjak, was established in 2005 mainly as a service cooperative, where members carry out their production individually. Oktjabr is the ex-Soviet farm turned cooperative mentioned above, where members privately own land plots and pool them together for collective cultivation by the cooperative. Nadyrbek explains:

> Nadyrbek: Ak-Bulut is in the first category, it is small. In autumn Ak-Bulut will join with Tüshün [another cooperative similar to Ak-Bulut, of which Nadyrbek is the chairman] but we will see the results of this merger only next year. But also with the merger the size of the union will still be small. On the contrary, Oktjabr is in the second category. Because it exists since the Soviet time and of course they have a lot of experience. Maybe Tüshün together with Ak-Bulut will become like Oktjabr in ten years!

> Ottavia: So, are you saying that Oktjabr is an example of the ideal cooperative the government wants to develop in the country?

> Nadyrbek: Yes! (Nadyrbek, 01.09.2015)

Nadyrbek's affirmative answer to my last question does not necessarily prove that his – or more generally the government's – ideal of cooperative are production cooperatives and not service cooperatives. From his argumentation here and from Nurlan's disorientation regarding my questions, we can conclude that both men lack the specific knowledge of the categorisation of cooperatives as formulated by ICA, scholarly literature, and development workers. However, these two examples also suggest something else: that this categorisation (the distinction between production and service cooperatives, the different forms of governance, etc.) might be not very relevant for governmental actors in Kyrgyzstan. Nadyrbek seems not to care whether land plots in the second type of cooperative are privately owned or property of the cooperative or whether members have a voice in management. What is important is that a cooperative is big and has machinery and experience. This resonates with Baburbek's ideal of cooperatives as big and endowed with modern machines discussed above. The specific knowledge they lack about the "Western classification" of cooperatives (as Lerman 2013a, 7–10 calls it, see above), is probably not very relevant for Nadyrbek and Nurlan.
The scene with Nurlan brings us even one step further. When asked about the type of cooperatives the local government would like to develop, Nurlan does not mention examples of what Western scholars and development practitioners would consider a cooperative. Instead, he mentions some successful businesses or activities in the region – activities that bring job opportunities or renovated buildings to the local population – and shows some random flyers of modern agricultural machines. What if even the concept itself of cooperative as a member-owned enterprise, in the end, is not very relevant in the specific local context and if, instead, what counts is that an economic activity brings whatever material benefit it does to the local population? For the moment, this remains an intuition; I develop it in Chapter 7.

### 6.4.2 Ideals of modernity and development

Having a look to current governmental agricultural policies beyond the promotion of cooperatives is useful at this moment to contextualise and expand the reflections of the previous sections. By 2004 the distribution of land shares and other assets from the ex-Soviet farms can be considered finished. Several scholars identify in this moment the start of the third phase of agrarian reforms, which aims at further developing and reinforcing private agriculture and agri-business focusing on service and infrastructure (Lerman and Sedik 2009a, 4). Ten years later, however, the *National Strategy of Sustainable Development of the Kyrgyz Republic for 2013–2017* (Government of the Kyrgyz Republic 2013, hereafter NSSD 2013-17) states the limited success of these reforms:

> The reforms fell short of expectations: ill-conceived government policies have led to this strategic industry acquiring the forms of *subsistence farming and low-value (small-commodity) agricultural production*. [...] the small size of land holdings leads to *primitivism production and is a significant limitation for effective agricultural production*, increase of the capital-and-labor ratio and growth of productivity. (NSSD 2013–17, 86, emphasis added).

This analysis identifies the main problem of the agricultural sector in the fragmentation of agricultural production and points to the ineffectiveness of small-scale farming, which is defined as “primitive”. As a solution, the strategy proposes the “concentration of lands among effective owners” (NSSD 2013–17, 88) and the support to “efficient agricultural producers” with more than 100 hectares of land, including cooperatives that integrate small peasant farms (NSSD 2013–17, 89). The newest strategy (Government of the Kyrgyz Republic 2017, hereafter NSSD 2018-22) maintains this direction, suggesting that “important measures for the development of the agro-industrial complex will be to overcome small-scale production, create medium and large processing complexes, develop logistics and reduce the role of intermediaries in commodity markets” (NSSD 2018–22, 22).

This analysis and the solution it proposes are in opposition to the vision of the development actors and agricultural economists discussed above, who instead underline the effectiveness and higher productivity of small-scale farming in comparison with larger farms (Lerman and Sedik 2018). Commenting the statements of the Kyrgyzstani government on post-independence reforms, Lerman and Sedik (2009a, 14) note:
Ministry of Agriculture officials remain dissatisfied and highly sceptical of [the] achievements [of land reform]. They view land reform as a destructive process that dismantled the capital-intensive and highly commercialized large-scale farms and drove Kyrgyzstan to highly fragmented small subsistence farms.

The vision expressed in the governmental strategy suggests that the government's ideal for the agricultural sector corresponds to a form of agriculture based on large-scale agro-industry exploiting economies of scale through capital intensification. This vision neglects the important contribution of family farming for rural livelihoods and food security in Kyrgyzstan – during the Soviet regime as well as today – and worldwide. It seems at the same time to ignore the risks related to land concentration, which often leads to a dual agricultural sector with a growing divide between wealthy agro-industrial enterprises and the subsistence agriculture of a poor rural population which has to accept poorly paid jobs in the private enterprises (e.g. Mitchell 2002; Verdery 2003).

For Lerman and Sedik (2009a, 14), this vision originates in the government's attachment to the ideal of Soviet large-scale and highly mechanised agriculture; they observe that, "in promoting this view, [Ministry of Agriculture officials] ignore the well-documented chronic inefficiency of the Soviet model of agriculture and the recent evidence of superior performance of family farms in all CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] countries, including Kyrgyzstan". In noting this, Lerman and Sedik take the occasion to highlight once more the inferiority of the Soviet economic model. At the same time, they assume that the Soviet model is the referent for the government, ignoring that the rest of the world, including large parts of the Global North, are full of examples of large-scale agro-industrial businesses. In fact, in my interviews with governmental actors, they often refer with desirous envy to examples of large-scale farming from Western Europe or North America – examples often transmitted by foreign agencies or enterprises that sometimes even invite governmental representatives to organised trips to visit these examples in person. I suggest that, if it is probable that the Soviet referent plays a role in the government's vision, what is more relevant for such vision is the ideal of modernity and progress through agro-industrial business more generally – be it Soviet or Western. This ideal is constructed in opposition to the "primitivism" of small-scale farming and creates again a dichotomous narrative in which one pole represents the fullness and the other is defined in the negative for its lacks (of development and modernity).

In our interviews, civil servants reproduce the vision expressed in the governmental strategies of an agricultural sector that should tend towards land concentration and the establishment of large farming enterprises. When speaking of cooperatives – as we have seen for the case of Nadyrbek – they underline their advantages related to the possibility to increase plot size through land pooling. In this sense, it is clear that they have in mind some form of collective *production*. In particular, they point to the problem of land degradation due to limited practices of crop rotation: according to them, a proper rotation that allows soil regeneration is possible only on big land plots.
6.4.3 Discussion: navigating ambiguity

The governmental vision that emerged in the previous section contrasts the vision of international agencies, which since Kyrgyzstan’s independence have pushed towards another mode of agricultural production: small- to medium-scale private farming supported by service cooperatives. At the same time, the Kyrgyzstani government has also produced specific strategies for the promotion of cooperatives, which declare the goal of developing service cooperatives and which are thus in line with the vision of international agencies. I suggest that this ambiguity (or even contradiction) in the statements of governmental actors is not necessarily due to their “lack of understanding” of cooperatives, but it could be part of a (fully or partially) intentional strategy to please foreign actors while maintaining a vision of large-scale agricultural production as the goal for the development of the national agricultural sector.

This argument seems to be confirmed by the variable positions governmental actors assume of cooperatives in different contexts. Remember how Talant complained that, when visiting the Issyk-Kul province and giving speeches to a broad public of citizens, governmental representatives praise the example of Oktjabr, a big production cooperative. As we will see in Chapter 7 (and as we have already seen in the case of Nadyrbek), residents of the Issyk-Kul province often bring Oktjabr as an example of ideal agricultural enterprise. Praising Oktjabr might therefore be a way for governmental representatives to acquire sympathy among the local population. On the contrary, during a Forum on Cooperatives organised by CUK and the Asia and Pacific section of ICA, the invited governmental representatives emphasised the importance of “modern” service cooperatives in their speeches.

By navigating contradictory visions of cooperatives and development in this way, the Kyrgyzstani government was able in the last three decades to attract important resources from foreign organisations, as the numerous rural development programmes implemented in the country since independence demonstrate. I am not arguing that in the last three decades “the Kyrgyzstani government”, as a unitary actor, has deployed a coherent and fully intentional strategy consisting in openly supporting a discourse in which it does not believe while hiding its true agenda in order to cheat foreign donors and win their resources. First of all, I have shown in the present section that “the Kyrgyzstani government” is not a unitary actor but rather an assemblage of individuals, papers, laws, buildings, fridges transformed into safes, etc. Secondly, the material presented in this section also shows that actors’ strategies are rather constituted of sets of multiple, often contradictory and always situated discursive and material practices. In this regard, the Kyrgyzstani government – or the Kyrgyzstani state more generally – is constituted through a process of improvisation as noted by Jeffrey (2012) for the case of Bosnia: it is performed within a specific structure of available material and symbolic resources (“resourcefulness”). Governmental actors navigate between the limited financial resources of the government and the opportunities offered by international donors. They mediate their own aspirations between changing ideals of development and modernity, “making do” with what is at hand in always partial and never fully predictable trajectories (see also Reeves 2014).
**6.5 Conclusion: representations and practices of the promotion of cooperatives**

The entry point for the analysis in the present chapter was the narrative of failure of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan. We have seen that the discourse on cooperatives by scholars and development actors resembles the broader developmentalist discourse denounced by postdevelopment scholars. It is a discourse that creates dichotomous categories based on the valuation of specific knowledge and experience (rooted in the Global North) over local knowledges and experiences. The dominant discourse on cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan narrowly defines what is the “true” – or at least the only desirable – form of agricultural cooperatives: this form coincides with the service cooperative model where farmers maintain individual production and use the cooperative as a way to increase their power in the agricultural market by marketing their produce collectively and accessing services (such as credit and extension services) that would be more difficult to access individually. This cooperative model corresponds to the idea of cooperatives that development programmes have promoted worldwide as a way to strengthen private farming within market economies (§2.1.2).

As a consequence, the definition of “successful” cooperatives is narrow, limited to those that fully correspond to the model promoted. The model, however, is an ideal; to be realised in practice, is necessarily negotiated and adapted to the specificities of the local context – specificities that are hardly considered in the formulation of the model, which is proposed worldwide in the most different contexts. The definition of “successful” cooperatives is also biased because it is based on a hierarchisation of knowledge that privileges a knowledge that has emerged from particular experiences in specific contexts in the Global North. This knowledge – and the categories it proposes – is not so relevant or pertinent in the specific context of contemporary Kyrgyzstan. It is not surprising, then, that local actors refer to other categories and knowledges and that their ambiguous narratives and actions can be interpreted as originating from a general “lack of knowledge”. On these premises, the failure of cooperatives in Kyrgyzstan lamented by scholars and development actors seems a self-fulfilling prophecy rather than the unintended consequence of development intervention.

In his illuminating paper titled “Is Good Policy Unimplementable?”, Mosse (2004) draws attention on the relation between developmental policies and practices. He shows that, rather than policies directly defining practices, it is the way around: policies emerge out of situated practices and are the results of negotiations of legitimacy and authority. The “success” or the “failure” of a project, thus, is not determined by the concrete actions that follow its implementation; instead, success and failure are the results of processes of legitimation within “wider networks of support and validation” (id. 658). In this sense, I argue that the “failure” of cooperative in Kyrgyzstan is the result of a specific legitimation process that values a particular model of service cooperative in particular and a particular kind of Western knowledge more generally while delegitimising local past and present experiences of cooperation.