Section Six Lessons of the Aral Sea Disaster: Implications for Social Learning

Abstract

The Aral Sea Disaster was a failure of social learning. Rather than evidencing a society that learned from its experiences and modified its behavior to create outcomes that could be sustained over time, there was a self-destructive element in the Soviet approach that, in this case, proved amazingly effective. Once an idea was advanced from the top, a whole array of social mechanisms were deployed to take the concept at its literal or face value and make it into an unassailable truth, even when many of the actors fully understood the futility, foolishness or destructiveness of the venture. Moreover, it was the nature of the system to employ a rigid system of accountability even for a lax system of feasibility. People lost careers, homes and lives for failure to meet quotas. More often, numbers were doctored. Blame was shifted to the least powerful while the true weakest links were bolstered. Corruption further distorted a system that was based on distortion. Everything in the system was a distortion but for the one crucial ability to deliver the required action, regardless of the outcome. The western concept of gridlock, where a project faces innumerable hurdles, applies here only to the correctives, mitigations and solutions, but not to principle action.

Citation

Edelstein, M.R. (2012), "Section Six Lessons of the Aral Sea Disaster: Implications for Social Learning", Edelstein, M.R., Cerny, A. and Gadaev, A. (Ed.) Disaster by Design: The Aral Sea and its Lessons for Sustainability (Research in Social Problems and Public Policy, Vol. 20), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 411-414. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0196-1152(2012)0000020040