The Brief Research Report examined reforms enacted between 2016 and 2019: the som was allowed to float in September 2017, an e-visa system and expanded visa-free access followed in 2018, and a national tourism law and development concept took effect in 2019. The authors used international tourism as an indicator of regulatory change because the sector responds to administrative barriers encountered by foreign visitors, including currency exchange, entry procedures and legal protections. Tourism is also highly exposed to external disruption, allowing the researchers to examine whether Uzbekistan’s reformed sector recovered from the COVID-19 shock as quickly as, or faster than, regional comparators that had not reformed to the same degree.

To place the reforms in a broader regional context, the researchers assembled a 2010–2024 panel covering Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Moldova. They combined four analytical approaches: interrupted time-series modeling, synthetic control, difference-in-differences with wild-cluster bootstrap inference, and fixed-effects panel regression. The synthetic-control design constructed a weighted “synthetic Uzbekistan” from Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Georgia and Armenia, reproducing the country’s pre-reform arrival trajectory before comparing it with the observed path after 2017.

The other models accounted for common trends, macroeconomic conditions, country-specific differences and a change in the statistical definition of arrivals after 2020. The synthetic control reproduced Uzbekistan’s pre-reform pattern closely, with a pre-period root mean squared prediction error of 0.04, but fell progressively behind the observed series after the reforms began. Between 2017 and 2019, before the pandemic and the arrival-counting change, Uzbekistan averaged 0.38 log points above this counterfactual, corresponding to approximately 46% more arrivals.

When each of the eight countries was treated in turn as though it had experienced the reform, Uzbekistan had the largest divergence, ranking first of eight. However, with only eight possible donor-pool rankings, the smallest attainable permutation p-value was about 0.13, which is below conventional statistical significance. The authors therefore characterize the result as a substantively large effect with limited statistical certainty rather than a statistically significant effect.

Other estimates pointed in the same direction without resolving that uncertainty. The interrupted time-series analysis identified a positive post-2017 level shift of 0.145 log points, but the estimate was imprecise, with a p-value of 0.57, because the model contained only 15 annual observations and arrivals were already increasing before the reforms. A difference-in-differences model comparing Uzbekistan with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan implied a reform-associated premium of roughly 18%, yet its wild-cluster bootstrap p-value was 0.75.

That design included only four clusters, making conventional cluster-robust inference unreliable. An artificial break assigned to 2014 produced a small, insignificant interaction, consistent with broadly parallel pre-treatment trends, but the placebo test did not establish the size of the original reform estimate. All six Worldwide Governance Indicators improved over the study period and were positively correlated with log arrivals, with correlations ranging from 0.61 to 0.78.

Regulatory quality had a correlation of 0.74, government effectiveness 0.78, rule of law 0.75 and control of corruption 0.73. Voice and accountability had a correlation of 0.71, while political stability had the lowest correlation at 0.61. In the fixed-effects analysis, a one-standard-deviation improvement in regulatory quality corresponded to approximately 16% higher arrivals, although the coefficient lost precision once country fixed effects, a common trend and the measurement-break control were included.

Institutional quality, visa liberalization, currency reform and the broader growth of arrivals moved together, preventing the panel model from separating their effects. The association was strongest for long-haul visitors from outside the Commonwealth of Independent States, who were less likely than regional travelers to be affected by movements within the region. Non-CIS arrivals increased about 6.5-fold, from 0.15 million in 2016 to 0.98 million in 2024, and their correlation with regulatory quality was 0.80.

The authors also found that voice and accountability improved from an extremely low base but remained the lowest governance dimension in level, reaching –1.0 in 2024. They interpret the pattern as consistent with administrative and regulatory sources of institutional credibility rather than democratization being the binding constraint on tourism. This interpretation remains descriptive because the study cannot isolate which component of the reform package produced the observed changes.

The study separately examined resilience by indexing arrivals to their 2019 level. International arrivals fell 78% in 2020, then recovered to within 2% of the 2019 level by 2023 and approximately 21% above it by 2024. Uzbekistan’s rebound closely resembled those of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and was stronger than Georgia’s, which remained below its 2019 total in 2024.

The evidence shows that Uzbekistan recovered at least as quickly as several regional peers. It does not show that Uzbekistan was uniquely resilient, and the recovery cannot be attributed specifically to the reforms. Important measurement and design limitations constrain the interpretation.

Data for 2010–2019 measure World Bank and UN Tourism overnight visitors, while the 2020–2024 national border-entry series covers individuals arriving from abroad, a broader category dominated by short visits. The researchers included an explicit break indicator and re-estimated key models using only consistently measured pre-pandemic data; the qualitative results were unchanged. In the pre-2020 fixed-effects model, the regulatory-quality coefficient was 0.44 with a cluster-robust p-value of 0.40, while log GDP was positive and significant at 0.50 with a p-value of 0.02.

Approximately 80% of arrivals came from neighboring CIS countries, and the majority of visits in 2023 were for family purposes, so regional mobility complicates interpretation. The non-CIS analysis reduced but did not eliminate this issue because long-haul arrivals remained small in absolute terms. Several 2024 values were also provisional, and the Worldwide Governance Indicators methodology was revised in 2025.

A further complication is the possibility that currency depreciation helped tourism independently of legal credibility. The 2017 float roughly halved the som’s dollar value, potentially making Uzbekistan cheaper for foreign visitors. The study’s GDP and growth controls do not capture that relative-price effect, and the non-CIS analysis cannot separate cheaper travel from greater confidence in the country’s institutions.

The authors note, however, that the depreciation was a one-time level change, while arrivals continued accelerating through 2018 and 2019 after implementation of the e-visa and tourism-law measures. They also point out that currency convertibility was itself a legal-institutional commitment rather than a purely macroeconomic change. Their overall conclusion is deliberately restrained: legal codification, currency convertibility and simpler entry procedures coincided with a large and statistically uncertain tourism gap, followed by a recovery comparable to neighboring countries.

The bundled reforms, limited donor pool, changing measurement and low statistical power prevent a causal conclusion.

Subject of Research: Political economy of institutional reform and resilience in Uzbekistan’s tourism sector

Article Title: Institutions, law, and resilience: the political economy of tourism-sector reform in Uzbekistan’s integration into the global economy

Article References: Urakova, D. B., Usmanova, A. B., Khamidov, O., Ergashev, J. Y., Murodova, D. J., & Ruziyeva, G. F. (2026). Institutions, law, and resilience: the political economy of tourism-sector reform in Uzbekistan’s integration into the global economy. Frontiers in Political Science, 8, Article 1919183. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpos.2026.1919183

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fpos.2026.1919183

Keywords: Uzbekistan, tourism arrivals, institutional reform, legal reform, economic resilience, synthetic control, regulatory quality, Central Asia, COVID-19 recovery, political economy, Institutions, resilience

The research team, led by Benjayamas Pilayon of Nakhon Phanom University and Nitikorn Phoosuwan of Thammasat University and Uppsala University, set out to answer a question that has been largely overlooked in the literature on social and care farming: how does organic agriculture specifically, as opposed to conventional or subsistence farming, contribute to disability-inclusive livelihoods in a low-resource, post-pandemic rural setting? To explore this, the researchers adopted a descriptive phenomenological design anchored in the sustainable livelihoods framework, which examines how households construct their livelihoods from available human, natural, financial, social, and physical assets within existing institutional structures.

Between July and December 2023, the team conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews lasting 60 to 90 minutes with 16 participants in one district of Nakhon Phanom Province. Ten were parents or primary caregivers of children with physician-diagnosed intellectual disabilities who were currently or previously engaged in organic farming; six were key stakeholders, including government health and agricultural officers, private sector representatives, community health workers, and disability support organization staff. Recruitment was facilitated by the Association for Intellectually Disabled Persons of Nakhon Phanom Province and local health volunteers, and interviews continued until informational redundancy was achieved, meaning three successive interviews produced no new codes or subcategories. The researchers explicitly acknowledge that this network-based recruitment may have under-represented families disconnected from disability services, a limitation they flag as potential selection bias.

The analytical pipeline followed a systematic code-to-category progression: researchers independently coded meaningful units from transcripts, grouped them into categories, and developed themes through iterative discussion and consensus. Thirty-seven initial codes were distilled into four main categories: general family conditions, post-COVID-19 consequences, organic farming challenges during the pandemic, and support needs for sustainable career development. A subset of roughly 20 percent of transcripts was coded independently by two researchers spanning clinical and agricultural disciplines, a reflexivity strategy designed to counteract the team’s own professional predisposition to view farming primarily through a therapeutic lens.

The picture that emerged was one of persistent economic fragility. Most families had four to six members, relied on agriculture or contract work, and supplemented their income with disability allowances and the earnings of male household heads. Incomes were consistently insufficient for family expenses, and the pandemic cut family incomes in the province by 1,000 to 3,000 baht per month, roughly 28 to 35 US dollars, a substantial share of rural household budgets. Caregivers frequently paid an even steeper price: as one mother explained, she had to supervise her daughter constantly and could not leave her alone, and as a result she lost her job. The pandemic also severed the informal networks through which these families exchanged knowledge and mutual support, undermining the social fabric that sustains community resilience.

Perhaps the most striking finding concerns the actual reach of organic agriculture. Only two of the ten participating families had achieved certified organic status, growing rice and vegetables while registered with provincial organic farming organizations. The remaining eight households used conventional or partially chemical-reduced methods and expressed an intent, rather than an active transition, toward certification. The authors are candid about what this means for interpretation: the findings on organic agriculture represent a combination of immediate empirical experience from two households and aspirational trajectories from the rest of the sample. This honesty matters, because it tempers the study’s sustainability claims while still pointing to significant untapped potential.

Why does organic farming matter for this population at all? The researchers identify three mechanisms that distinguish it from conventional alternatives. First, it minimizes exposure to toxic agrochemicals for vulnerable children and their caregivers, a meaningful advantage given the health sensitivities of people with intellectual disabilities. Second, it provides flexible, low-intensity labor options that can adapt to varying physical and cognitive abilities. Third, cooperatives and certification processes offer structured, low-risk roles within an organized system. The interviews bore this out: children could participate meaningfully under supervision, watering vegetables and growing crops alongside their parents, though the degree of participation varied with individual capabilities and support needs. This observation challenges traditional assumptions about productivity and employment in agriculture and echoes international research on social and care farming, which has documented benefits for sensory function, physical development, self-esteem, and responsibility.

Barriers, however, remain formidable. Families reported knowledge gaps in organic principles, techniques, and certification processes; technical constraints in pest management and soil health; and crushing production costs, with one participant noting that fertilizers and agricultural treatments had become prohibitively expensive. Market access was perhaps the most binding constraint, with insufficient marketing support and limited connections to value chains preventing families from capturing the economic benefits of organic production. Resource constraints, including limited access to land, seeds, and organic inputs, further hindered any scaling up. Participants were clear about what they wanted: training in modern organic techniques and vegetable cultivation, seeds and equipment from government agencies, allocated community land for organic agriculture, comprehensive welfare coverage, updated databases of intellectually disabled children, and legal frameworks supporting employment for persons with disabilities. Several families also expressed interest in diversified systems such as aquaculture and integrated farming, reflecting a sound instinct for risk diversification.

From these findings, the authors derive three concrete policy interventions rather than broad exhortations. They propose inclusive extension services in which agricultural officers are trained to adapt organic farming instruction for households with intellectually disabled relatives; community social farming cooperatives that pool land, labor, and certification expenses to reduce individual entry barriers; and government procurement programs, such as sourcing organic produce for school lunches or public hospitals, that would guarantee a stable market and mitigate the commercial risks of transitioning to organic methods. These recommendations align with the Sustainable Development Goals on poverty reduction, decent work, and reduced inequalities, and they connect the Thai case to a global context in which approximately 1.3 billion people, 16 percent of humanity, live with disabilities, including some 58.2 million children with developmental or intellectual disabilities.

The study’s limitations are acknowledged with unusual transparency. The small, purposive sample from a single province makes the findings exploratory and context-specific rather than generalizable; the researchers frame them as policy-relevant hypotheses for future larger-scale work. No farm-level economic data, such as yields, incomes, or cost breakdowns, were systematically collected, which limits the ability to evaluate organic agriculture as a financially viable livelihood option. The voices of the disabled children and young adults themselves were mediated entirely through caregivers and stakeholders, and future studies should incorporate developmentally tailored, participatory self-reporting. Interviews were conducted in the local Isan dialect with excerpts back-translated into English, but formal cross-cultural validation was not performed. Even so, the core message stands: sustainable organic farming, embedded in integrated support systems that combine social entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer, and policy intervention, can provide economic opportunity, therapeutic engagement, and social inclusion simultaneously, offering families raising intellectually disabled children not just a livelihood but a foundation for community-level resilience in the wake of a global crisis.

Subject of Research: Post-pandemic experiences of families with intellectually disabled children engaged in organic farming in northeast Thailand

Article Title: Post-COVID-19 experiences of families in organic farming with intellectually disabled children in northeast Thailand: a qualitative study

Article References: Pilayon, B., Praweenwongwuthi, S., Utaisang, A., Panlakphon, P., Hongma, P., Chueaduangpui, K., Saentho, J., & Phoosuwan, N. (2026). Post-COVID-19 experiences of families in organic farming with intellectually disabled children in northeast Thailand: a qualitative study. SN Social Sciences, 6(9), Article 391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01681-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01681-5

Keywords: organic farming, intellectual disability, COVID-19 recovery, Thailand, sustainable livelihoods, qualitative research, social farming, community resilience, disability inclusion, rural development, Sustainable Development Goals, caregiving

Scotto’s book, running to 202 pages, takes as its conceptual anchor the theory of intergovernmentalism, the family of approaches in European Union studies that treats member states, and especially their executives, as the decisive actors in European integration. In the classic formulation associated with scholars such as Andrew Moravcsik, national governments negotiate on behalf of domestically defined interests, and the outcomes of those negotiations reflect the relative bargaining power and preferences of the states at the table. A related strand, often called liberal intergovernmentalism, adds a two-level logic in which governments first aggregate domestic preferences and then bargain internationally, with institutions designed largely to lock in credible commitments. The rival view, neofunctionalism, has long predicted the opposite dynamic: crises create functional pressures that push integration forward, transferring authority to bodies such as the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the Court of Justice as spillovers accumulate.

What makes the book’s framing timely, as the review underscores, is the sheer density of crises the Union has navigated in recent years. The eurozone sovereign debt crisis that began around 2010 forced unprecedented interventions, including bailout programs administered with the Commission and the International Monetary Fund, the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism, and the launch of the European Central Bank’s Outright Monetary Transactions program, which signaled a willingness to backstop sovereign debt markets. The migration crisis of 2015 exposed deep fractures over burden-sharing and border control. The Brexit referendum of 2016 marked the first negotiated departure of a member state. And the COVID-19 pandemic produced the NextGenerationEU recovery instrument, a joint borrowing program of historic scale that many observers read as a departure from orthodox intergovernmental caution. Each episode generated its own reform debate, from treaty change proposals to quieter institutional adaptations, and each became a test case for theories of integration.

The analytical stakes of this debate are considerable. If intergovernmentalist accounts are correct, then the Union’s crisis responses should be legible as bargains among powerful member states, with Germany and France setting the terms, smaller states negotiating concessions, and supranational institutions acting primarily as agents of the governments that created them. If neofunctionalist or federalist accounts are correct, crisis responses should show autonomous agenda-setting by the Commission, doctrinal innovation by courts and central banks, and a ratchet effect in which emergency measures, once adopted, are never fully unwound. The empirical record is genuinely mixed. The European Stability Mechanism is an intergovernmental treaty organization outside the EU legal framework, a seemingly intergovernmentalist fact. Yet the ECB’s crisis management, the Commission’s role in policing bailout conditionality, and the community method elements of pandemic recovery spending all point toward supranational entanglement that pure state-centric models struggle to capture.

Scotto’s contribution, as characterized in the review, is to treat these episodes not as isolated stress tests but as a connected sequence through which a particular kind of order, an intergovernmental one, is repeatedly strained and repeatedly repaired. The notion of fragility in the title is doing real conceptual work. It suggests that the EU’s intergovernmental architecture is neither robust in the way federal systems are nor disposable in the way purely contractual arrangements are. Instead, it survives crisis through improvisation: new instruments are bolted on, informal norms are stretched, and the boundary between what member states control collectively and what has been delegated to Union institutions is continuously renegotiated. This resonates with a broader trend in EU studies away from grand theories of integration and toward fine-grained analysis of governance modes, differentiated integration, and the politics of emergency.

The review situates the book within a scholarly conversation that includes long-standing frameworks for analyzing decision-making in the European Union, such as the analytical typology advanced by John Peterson in the mid-1990s, which distinguished among different levels and arenas of EU decision-making, from the day-to-day management of policies to the system-defining choices made at European Council summits. It also connects to comparative work on regional institutions, including the volume Crafting Cooperation by Amitav Acharya and Alastair Iain Johnston, which examined how regional organizations across the world design institutions to manage cooperation and conflict. Placing the EU in this comparative frame matters because it resists the temptation to treat European integration as sui generis, an exception to every rule. Seen alongside ASEAN, Mercosur, or the African Union, the EU’s intergovernmental core looks less like an anomaly and more like one variant of a general problem: how sovereign states build durable collective institutions without surrendering the sovereignty that defines them.

For readers outside the specialized field, the practical implications are easier to grasp than the theoretical vocabulary might suggest. The way the EU handles crises determines who pays, who decides, and who is accountable. Intergovernmental crisis management tends to concentrate decision-making in European Council meetings and finance ministry negotiations, venues where heads of government answer to national electorates but where transparency is limited and smaller states have thin margins of influence. Supranational crisis management routes decisions through the Commission and the Parliament, adding layers of legal constraint and democratic oversight but also slowing responses and insulating decision-makers from direct national control. The pandemic recovery fund illustrated the trade-off vividly: joint borrowing on that scale would have been unthinkable under a strictly intergovernmental settlement, yet its distribution was negotiated in marathon summits in which national leaders, notably the so-called frugal states, extracted rebates and conditions. The resulting instrument was neither purely federal nor purely intergovernmental but a hybrid forged under emergency conditions.

The book’s attention to the reform process, as the review emphasizes, extends the analysis beyond crisis response to the question of what comes after the emergency. Formal treaty revision in the EU is famously difficult, requiring unanimity among member states and, for many changes, ratification in every national parliament and, in some cases, referendums. The bitter experience of the rejected Constitutional Treaty in 2005 and the years of institutional wrangling that produced the Lisbon Treaty taught EU actors to prefer instruments that avoid treaty change: intergovernmental treaties among subsets of states, enhanced cooperation among willing members, reinterpretation of existing legal provisions, and informal agreements among institutions. This repertoire of reform without revision is precisely the terrain on which fragile intergovernmental orders are maintained. It allows the Union to adapt to shocks while deferring the fundamental constitutional questions that each shock raises, a strategy that buys time but, critics argue, accumulates democratic and legal ambiguities.

There is also a normative dimension that the review’s framing invites readers to consider. Intergovernmentalism is often defended on democratic grounds: national governments are elected and accountable, so concentrating power in their hands keeps EU decision-making tethered to national electorates. It is criticized on the same grounds: intergovernmental bargaining happens behind closed doors, empowers executives over legislatures, and leaves citizens of smaller or weaker states with little say over decisions that bind them. The fragility Scotto identifies is therefore not only institutional but democratic. An order that survives crisis through executive improvisation may erode the legitimacy it needs to survive the next crisis. As the European Union confronts ongoing debates about enlargement, treaty reform, defense integration, and the rule of law within member states, the question of whether its intergovernmental core can absorb further strain remains open.

The review by Zejin Liu, published on 14 July 2025 in Global Public Policy and Governance, a journal affiliated with the Institute for Global Public Policy at Fudan University, signals that these questions are being read well beyond Europe. For scholars of comparative regionalism and global governance, the EU remains the most institutionally dense experiment in voluntary supranational cooperation ever attempted, and its crisis-driven evolution offers lessons, and warnings, for every other region contemplating deeper integration. Scotto’s book, whatever its ultimate place in the theoretical literature, addresses the central paradox of that experiment: the Union is simultaneously a construction of sovereign states and a force that constrains them, and the tension between those two identities is not a design flaw to be engineered away but the enduring condition of the European order itself. Fragile orders, the book’s title suggests, are the only kind the EU will ever have, and understanding their fragility is the first step toward understanding their resilience.

Subject of Research: Intergovernmentalism in European Union crisis governance and institutional reform

Article Title: Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp

Article References: Liu, Z. (2025). Matteo Scotto: Fragile orders: Understanding intergovernmentalism in the context of EU crises and reform process Menaggio, Italy: Villa Vigoni Editore, 2022, 202 pp. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(3), 297-301. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00119-7

Keywords: European Union, intergovernmentalism, EU crises, institutional reform, European integration, eurozone crisis, Brexit, COVID-19 recovery, EU governance, regional institutions, book review, political science