Describes the rationale for, and approach to, regulation of the water industry. Considers the effects of restructuring, the impacts of private participation in water, and the use of formal water markets

This chapter follows the Lena Goldfields Arbitration of 1930 and examines the legal practices deployed by the parties and the tribunal in their relation to the internationalisation of concession agreements. The tribunal was constituted after a dispute arose between a British company and the Soviet state over the fate of a concession agreement granted in 1925 concerning goldmines in Siberia, and it is the only international arbitration the Soviet Union ever participated in. The chapter takes as a starting point that the socialist revolution in the Soviet Union led to a fundamental change in the structure of the legal order, especially with regard to property rights. Instead of private individual ownership, Soviet law prescribed collectivised state ownership. The chapter argues that the tribunal elevated the jurisdiction over the Lena Goldfields concession agreement to the international level in order to override the application of socialist Soviet law. This elevation was achieved by relying on legal techniques concerning the competence of the arbitral tribunal and the applicable law to the concession agreement. While the Soviet Union maintained that the dispute was a matter of domestic jurisdiction, the company and the tribunal claimed the jurisdiction of an international legal order.

The socialist revolution in Russia introduced large-scale nationalisations and land reforms in order to empower the peasantry and the proletariat with a vision of establishing the ‘first worker’s state’.2 A key instrument in this undertaking was the nationalisation of private property, a transformation that was legal in nature. Indeed, as Scott Newton put it: ‘the elimination of private ownership of the means of production remains a breathtaking and unexampled demonstration of the puissance of law’.3

Examines the reform of Central Asia’s energy utilities in the light of the principles of corporatization, unbundling and privatization defined in the reform textbook literature and advocated by development banks. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan restructured, or are in the process of restructuring, their national energy (mainly electricity) utilities. Although restructuring has, at least to some extent, improved payment collection rates, it has generally failed to transform the utilities into financially viable entities. Chapter 4 therefore discusses Central Asia’s corporate reform process, and examines the institutional and geopolitical obstacles that have stalled this process. As illustrated by the discontinuation of the restructuring of the Kyrgyz gas utility following its purchase by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom, strategic investment in energy utilities can end reform initiatives. The analysis demonstrates that, in regions of high geopolitical importance, privatization can be an obstacle to reform rather than a force for good.