Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan – 17 June 2026
The EU-funded POLCA project convened the panel “Living Law and Layered Governance: Informal Institutions and Administrative Legacies in Central Asia” at the Central Eurasian Studies Society (CESS) Regional Conference on 17 June 2026. Bringing together researchers working across socio-legal studies, political economy, public administration, and historical institutional analysis, the panel examined how formal reforms in Central Asia interact with Soviet administrative legacies, informal norms, and everyday governance practices.
The panel was organised within POLCA — The Political Economy of Legal and Governance Reform in Non-Western Societies: Insights from Central Asia — a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges project coordinated within Lund University’s broader NORCA research environment. The discussion contributed to POLCA’s work on how alternative institutions and social norms shape legal and governance trajectories in non-Western societies.
About the CESS Regional Conference 2026
CESS Regional Conference 2026, held in person at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan, from 16 to 19 June, brought together researchers, academics, and students working across the humanities and social sciences of Central Eurasia. Under the theme “(Re)thinking Central Eurasia: Spaces, Societies, and Power,” the conference promoted interdisciplinary dialogue and critical perspectives through research presentations, panel discussions, networking, and opportunities to strengthen collaborative research initiatives.
Research Presentations
Professor Rustamjon Urinboyev (Lund University) presented “Layered Administrations: Communist Legacies, Informal Norms, and the Everyday State in Post-Soviet Central Asia.” The paper challenged linear accounts in which Soviet administrative institutions are gradually replaced by Western-inspired governance models. Instead, it introduced the concept of layered administrations to describe how inherited doctrines, post-independence reforms, and locally rooted normative orders coexist and interact. Drawing particularly on qualitative evidence from Uzbekistan, the research highlighted how officials navigate formal law, bureaucratic rules, and informal obligations in everyday state practice.
Professor Kobil Ruziev (UWE Bristol) and Professor Peter Finke (University of Zurich) presented “Formal Change, Informal Persistence: Institutional Contradictions in Uzbekistan’s Hybrid Governance.” Their paper examined why ambitious formal reforms may struggle to gain credibility when inherited administrative logics and relational networks continue to shape decision-making and enforcement. Using examples involving mahalla institutions and the persistence of sectoral management practices, the study explored the gap between official policy goals and governance outcomes in hybrid institutional settings.
Dr. Dilaver Khamzaev (Lund University) presented “Archiving Authoritarianism: The Afterlife of Soviet Prosecutorial Power in Post-Communist Public Administration.” The paper reconsidered Uzbekistan’s Prosecutor’s Office not only as an enforcer of legal norms, but also as an institution that mediates legal change across international, national, and local levels. It examined how international standards are translated into domestic reforms, how formal rules are filtered through institutional discretion, and how prosecutorial bodies mediate between citizens and executive authorities through local grievance mechanisms.
Professor Zhuldyz Davletbayeva and Mr. Alexandr Zagrebin (Academy of Public Administration under the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan) examined civil service reform in Kazakhstan through the framework of citizen-centric and inclusive public administration. Based on a survey of civil servants, their paper explored how public officials understand citizen-centredness and inclusiveness, as well as the institutional conditions that influence the implementation of more responsive governance practices.
Mr. Alexandr Zagrebin and Professor Zhuldyz Davletbayeva also presented research on public councils in Kazakhstan. Drawing on interviews and focus group discussions with council members, civil society representatives, and experts, the paper assessed the councils’ capacity to support dialogue between public institutions and civil society. It highlighted both their potential as participatory platforms and the structural constraints created by advisory mandates, communication challenges, and limited influence over decision-making.
Discussion Highlights
Following the presentations, the discussant offered reflections on the papers and their shared themes. The panel then opened to a Q&A session, allowing participants to engage with the presenters and discuss the research in greater depth.
Across the presentations, the panel showed that legal and administrative reform cannot be understood through formal institutions alone. Participants examined how reform programmes encounter historically embedded bureaucratic practices, informal networks, community institutions, and overlapping sources of authority.
The contributions also demonstrated the value of comparative and interdisciplinary approaches to governance in Central Asia. By linking institutional history with empirical research on public administration, civic participation, prosecutorial authority, and informal governance, the panel contributed to wider debates on legal pluralism, state transformation, and the practical challenges of reform in non-Western contexts.
Project Context
POLCA — The Political Economy of Legal and Governance Reform in Non-Western Societies: Insights from Central Asia — is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Staff Exchanges project running from 2026 to 2029 (project number 101228676). It addresses a central challenge in global governance: why decades of rule-of-law and democratisation initiatives have often struggled to deliver in non-Western contexts. The project starts from the premise that reforms cannot be fully understood or improved without examining the alternative institutions and norms that organise social life beyond formal state structures.
With Central Asia as its primary geographical focus, POLCA investigates how customary norms, religious values, communitarian practices, informal networks, and inherited administrative arrangements shape everyday legality, dispute resolution, governance, and socio-economic life. Its “alternative orders” framework examines how global and regional norms intersect with national legal systems and local social orders, treating informal practices as social facts that may complement or compete with state law. This approach is intended to support more context-sensitive pathways for strengthening trust in formal institutions and improving rule-of-law and governance strategies.
The CESS panel reflected these objectives by connecting research on institutional layering, informal persistence, prosecutorial authority, civil-service reform, and civic participation. It strengthened interdisciplinary exchange on how historically embedded institutions and contemporary reform programmes interact in practice across Central Asia