After the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Kazakhstan’s policymakers recognised that the existing model of state governance had proved ineffective and needed to be changed. One of the necessary solutions was to carry out decentralisation. The main purpose of the following article is to outline the barriers that Kazakhstan must remove if it is serious about building local self-government independence. Confronting these with the President’s vision of the transformation of local self-government led to the following research questions: what organisational and legal issues remain unresolved or constitute a barrier to the construction of independent local government structures in the Republic of Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union?; to what extent do the changes proposed by President Kasym Tokayev meet the real challenges in the context of expanding the autonomy of local power structures? Finding answers to the questions posed was possible by analysing legal acts, literature, and press materials.

After the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), Kazakhstan’s policymakers recognized that the existing model of state governance had proved ineffective and needed to be changed. One of the necessary solutions was to carry out decentralization. The primary purpose of the following article is to outline the barriers that Kazakhstan needs to remove if it is serious about building local self-government independence. Confronting these with the President’s vision of the transformation of local self-government led to the following research questions: What organizational and legal issues remain unresolved or constitute a barrier to the construction of independent local government structures in the Republic of Kazakhstan after the collapse of the Soviet Union?; to what extent do the changes proposed by President Kasym Tokayev meet the real challenges in the context of expanding the autonomy of local power structures? Answering the questions posed was possible by analyzing legal acts and finding literature and press materials.