Uzbekistan became this year the first country in Central Asia to officially adopt the Think.CareCoop and Start.CareCoop tools designed by the International Labour Organization. Put that way, it sounds like an institutional press release. Behind the announcement lies a state formalizing, through cooperative structure, work that for generations remained off the books and without any recognition whatsoever.
A care cooperative is a jointly owned organization where caregivers group together to negotiate conditions, receive training, and seek legal recognition—that's what the model promises. Work that was almost always done for free within families is now trying to gain formal standing.
This deserves saying upfront. This piece is not trying to predict whether Uzbekistan will fail or succeed. The Ministry of Employment's stated intention to scale up care cooperatives remains a goal, not a measured outcome. What can be examined is the design of the experiment and how it compares to what similar experiences elsewhere have already shown.
Why would Central Asia care about formalizing work that spent decades outside all statistics? Because the region has been sustaining an almost invisible care economy off the official record, and the ILO estimates that globally, unpaid care work amounts to trillions of dollars in uncounted value, sustained mostly by women. Uzbekistan, with an aging population and a female labor force historically relegated to domestic duties, fits the profile that attracts multilateral organizations looking for visible pilot cases.
International organizations need successes they can showcase. The UN has institutionalized cooperative years without any real corrective mechanisms, something already analyzed with respect to resolution A/RES/80/182. The same happens with the ILO when it promotes the social economy as an alternative. There's nothing illegitimate about that. The legitimate question is whether cooperative formalization actually transforms the power structure of caregivers or simply gives the Uzbek state a tidier, cheaper way to manage what families used to manage on their own.
That cui bono deserves a calm breakdown. The state reduces fiscal pressure on social protection systems by outsourcing care to cooperatives that operate on partial funding and expectations of self-sufficiency. The Ministry of Employment gains regional visibility as the first to adopt these ILO tools in Central Asia. UN agencies get a case that lends legitimacy to their social-economy narrative against purely market-based models. Caregivers gain, in the best-case scenario, legal recognition and training. In the worst case, they gain a label that formalizes precarity without resolving it.
I've seen similar patterns play out in other contexts. Indonesia is living it right now with the Red and White program, where researchers at Gadjah Mada University warn that eighty thousand new cooperatives could repeat the political capture that already afflicted the old KUD and BUMDes. Cooperative structure alone doesn't protect against state control. What determines whether it strengthens or contains is who controls the information and who audits the decisions.
The contrast is brutal. While Uzbekistan emerges as a regional pioneer in cooperative formalization of care, the Basque Country—one of Spain's most prosperous regions, within one of Europe's most consolidated welfare states—continues to document an unresolved care crisis. Reports from KUNR and sector analyses in the Basque Country show worker shortages, insufficient wages, and inadequate parental leave. Not even decades of a social state have fully relieved that pressure. Interesting. Very interesting.
This dismantles the implicit idea that the West already solved care and now merely exports solutions. It didn't solve it. It outsourced it, partially commodified it, or left it floating between overburdened families and underpaid migrant workers. The same problem seen in the care workers' strike in Nova Scotia resurfaces here. The work hardest to automate remains the worst paid, regardless of per capita income.
What separates a cooperativism born from the ground up from one imposed from above? The Rochdale textile cooperative, founded in 1844 by twenty-eight English weavers, was born to solve a concrete problem: buying flour without chalk fillers and escaping company stores that inflated prices. No ministry designed it. It arose because a group of workers with no individual power decided to band together. The cooperative movement that later spread across half of Europe grew out of that small, local solution.
Uzbek care cooperatives are born in the reverse direction: from a ministry, using tools crafted in Geneva, applied top-down onto a population that perhaps never took part in designing the rules. That doesn't condemn them from the outset—Mondragón combines centralized coordination with local autonomy and works with reasonable results. What it does change is the central question: who can correct course if the design fails. Without that feedback mechanism, the cooperative structure can become decorative—a veneer of legitimacy over power relations that remain untouched.
I acknowledge I have no direct visibility into how these specific cooperatives operate in Uzbekistan, nor whether the workers took part in drafting their bylaws or simply received them pre-made. That information isn't publicly available yet. Any categorical claim about success or failure would be premature. What can be said is that the precedent of political capture in state-driven cooperatives is well documented, and that the absence of corrective mechanisms is a reasonable warning sign, not a verdict.
There's something even more uncomfortable in this story. Almost no major Western outlet covered this Uzbek announcement with the attention it deserved. The hypothesis, after following similar coverage patterns, is that Uzbekistan doesn't fit the usual script. In that script, countries from the former Soviet bloc or emerging economies are passive recipients of policies designed in Washington, Brussels, or Geneva—not active laboratories. When a country like Uzbekistan gets ahead on an issue as sensitive as care, before Spain, Germany, or the United States do, the narrative asymmetry becomes uncomfortable. It's easier to ignore it.
Stones Don't Lie make this clear. I don't have a tidy conclusion about whether this will end up genuinely empowering Uzbek caregivers or turn into just another cost-containment mechanism dressed up as collective action. What I propose as an honest exercise is to stop observing these experiments through inverted binoculars, assuming that what happens in Tashkent is minor compared to what happens in Bilbao or New York. The care crisis is global, cutting across income levels, and no model—state, cooperative, or market-based—has fully solved it anywhere.
What if the real laboratory isn't where the West expects to find it?
