Re-specifying hydrocide: governance reproduction and cost externalisation in the Aral Sea basin

The Aral Sea crisis raises a question beyond environmental-governance failure: how can governance institutions persist alongside serious ecological degradation? This article assesses the proposition that displacement of water-related costs can help sustain such institutions. It proposes a structural re-specification of hydrocide requiring sustained degradation, its reproduction through governance, infrastructure and political economy, cumulative harm, and systematic displacement of material costs. An interdisciplinary case study examines what documented arrangements maintain and how far economic and spatial evidence can locate their distributional consequences. Document analysis distinguishes seasonal release compliance, production supervision and project-financed local recovery. An equal-weighted descriptive index compares selected Uzbek and Kazakh regions; historical equipped irrigation area and agricultural output yield opposing territorial orderings in the Karakalpakstan–Khorezm comparison. Institutional accounts distinguish access to WUA resources from control of everyday water delivery. Geospatial analysis then distinguishes population concentration from territorial extent and agricultural land cover. The joint valid-data domain covers approximately 23.26% of physical-basin area. Within this domain, 73.04% of modelled population and 47.48% of area lie within 5 km of selected mapped canal features, measured from cell centres. The corresponding shares within 10 km are 84.44% and 62.75%. The cropland partition shows that this population–area contrast is not uniform across land-cover settings. These cross-temporal descriptions do not identify service recipients or burden bearers. The synthesis shows why institutional performance, regional output and population location must be distinguished when assessing the distribution of water-related costs. The four hydrocide conditions have not been jointly demonstrated, and the proposed feedback from cost displacement to institutional continuity remains unverified.