Who is the law for? Drinking water governance and climate justice in Northern Australia (original) (raw)
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Water colonialism and Indigenous water justice in south-eastern Australia
International Journal of Water Resources Development
Political theorists argue that justice for cultural groups must account for socioeconomic distribution, political representation and cultural recognition. Combining this tripartite justice framework with settler colonial theory, we analyse novel data sets relating to Aboriginal peoples' water experiences in southeastern Australia. We construe persistent injustices as 'water colonialism', showing that the development of Australia's water resources has so far delivered little economic benefit to Aboriginal peoples, who remain marginalized from decision-making. We argue that justice theories need to encompass a fourth dimension-the vitally important socio-ecological realm-if they are to serve as conceptual resources for advancing Indigenous peoples' rights and needs.
Racialized water governance: the ‘hydrological frontier’ in the Northern Territory, Australia
Australasian Journal of Water Resources, 2022
Increased scrutiny and contestation over recent water allocation practices and licencing decisions in the Northern Territory (NT) have exposed numerous inadequacies in its regulatory framework. Benchmarking against the National Water Initiative shows that NT lags behind national standards for water management. We describe key weaknesses in NT's water law and policy, particularly for Indigenous rights and interests. NT is experiencing an acceleration of development, and is conceptualised as a 'hydrological frontier', where water governance has institutionalised regulatory spaces of inclusion and exclusion that entrench and (re)produce inequities and insecurities in water access. Regulations demarcate spaces in which laws and licencing practices provide certainty and security of rights for some water users, with opportunities to benefit from water development and services, while leaving much of NT (areas predominantly owned and occupied by Indigenous peoples) outside these legal protections. Water allocation and planning, as well as water service provision, continue to reinforce and reproduce racialised access to (and denial of) water rights. Combining an analysis of the law and policies that apply to water for economic development with those designed to regulate domestic water supply, we present a comprehensive and current picture of water insecurity for Indigenous peoples across the NT.
Rethinking Australian Water Law and Governance: Successes, Challenges, and the Future Directions
2016
Australia has been a world leader in water law and governance reform. However, after 20 years of progress, water is quickly slipping from the national agenda. Despite many remaining implementation challenges and drought risks, there has been little detailed intergovernmental direction about the " next steps " in Australia's water strategy. At this critical juncture, this Special Issue brings together leading water law and governance scholars and practitioners to contribute new lines of vision to Australian water governance as we move forward into the 21st century. This introductory article sets the scene for the Special Issue by outlining the key building blocks of Australia's water governance system, before laying out the key questions explored in the subsequent eight articles, namely: How far has Australia come with the National Water Initiative? Is the current governance system a sufficient model capable of broader application to meet future water challenges and a sustainable future? And what fundamental reforms and changes might be required and what other credible water governance and policy alternatives might be available? The article concludes by summarising and synthesising the issues around four key policy parameters, namely: markets; participation; groundwater and policy mixes; and developing northern Australia.
Environmental and planning law journal, 2016
Australia has been a world leader in water law and governance reform. However, after 20 years of progress, water is quickly slipping from the national agenda. Despite many remaining implementation challenges and drought risks, there has been little detailed intergovernmental direction about the "next steps" in Australia's water strategy. At this critical juncture, this Special Issue brings together leading water law and governance scholars and practitioners to contribute new lines of vision to Australian water governance as we move forward into the 21st century. This introductory article sets the scene for the Special Issue by outlining the key building blocks of Australia's water governance system, before laying out the key questions explored in the subsequent eight articles, namely: How far has Australia come with the National Water Initiative? Is the current governance system a sufficient model capable of broader application to meet future water challenges and a sustainable future? And what fundamental reforms and changes might be required and what other credible water governance and policy alternatives might be available? The article concludes by summarising and synthesising the issues around four key policy parameters, namely: markets; participation; groundwater and policy mixes; and developing northern Australia.
The New Politics of Water Fresh Water: New Perspectives on Water in Australia Edited
2007
Australia write straight into one of the most discussed and contentious issues of our time: fresh water. The book is an edited collection of eighteen essays, by twenty-seven authors from around Australia. The authors write from professions and perspectives ranging across the visual arts, academia, Indigenous First Nation organisations, and government natural resource management. The book's origins lie in a two-day workshop held in Adelaide, supported by the Hawke Research Institute at the University of Adelaide, the Academy of the Social Sciences, and the Academy of the Humanities. The workshop's focus on 'water justice' translates to the essays in the collection, which illuminate issues over 'fresh water' (mostly surface river water), with concerns for current, past, and future social and environmental (in)justice in Australia. Fresh Water attempts to create interdisciplinary conversations about water in Australia by bringing together such diverse perspectives. Underpinning the diversity of views is a bass chord that resonates with each essay. In introducing the collection Emily Potter and Stephen McKenzie highlight the deeper connection between the chapters: 'At the heart of the book is the relationship between humans and water: the tensions born of an intimacy predicated on our physical needs and a Western cultural history of environmental exploitation' (3). The strength of this volume is that the authors do not shy from the big issues, the political and social entanglements of water in riverine communities, injustice in access to water, and the need for change in government policy and non-indigenous conceptions of water more generally. Deborah Bird Rose (whose chapter 'Justice and longing' begins the book) calls for a 'new ethos' of water that is 'cross-cultural and inclusive'. Rose argues that we need to live for water, 'not just make a living from it' (original italics. 8). Drawing on her experiences working with Aboriginal communities on land claims from 1982 to 2006, Rose explores Indigenous connections with water, and what they reveal about western water values, as articulated in science, legislation, and everyday imaginings of water in Australia. Ecologists, such as those who worked to prevent irrigation dams being built upstream from Cooper's Creek, recognised the need to conserve
Human Geography
Water is a principal medium of exchange within communities facing changing climate patterns and the ‘new dry’. For some parts of the globe water has been taken-for-granted, uncontested, yet for others highly variable, scarce and a measure of global and national inequalities. Australia as a large and diverse landmass is emblematic of those varied water contexts, yet as a whole, and after the recent ‘100-year drought’, water has become heavily regulated and marketised, and its material and symbolic meanings transformed. This has led us to ask: “What happens when water becomes marked or recognised as a scarce resource for all, indeed a site of contest and potential human conflict? How do the attempts to control water, through its market currency and environmental value, change the character of communities, the identities and interpersonal relationships that constitute the regional context?” After all, water is about far more than a material resource, it is also a cultural medium that i...
Decolonising Indigenous water ‘rights’ in Australia: flow, difference, and the limits of law
Routledge eBooks, 2018
This article addresses Indigenous Australian claims to water resources and how they inform and relate to current Australian law and contemporary legal thinking about future possibilities. It adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing from historical records, previous ethnographic investigation with Indigenous Australians, current legal scholarship, and social anthropological theory. In doing so, it analyses Indigenous dependencies on water, the history of settler colonial orientations to water bodies, the evolution of settler colonial-Indigenous relations to natural resources, and the development of the Australian legal system's regulation of water. This provides foundations for a discussion of the limitations of settler colonial notions of property and the failure of settler colonial law to understand and incorporate the dynamism of Indigenous relationships to water, particularly the meaning and productive capacity of water flows within Indigenous cosmologies and sociocultural and ecological systems. Calling for a decolonial turn in legal approaches to Indigenous access and water resource determination, the authors explore the ways in which Australian law may need to 'unthink' settler colonial notions of resource ownership as a prerequisite for reformulating future water policy and planning. This reformulation relies on a more extensive legal philosophical engagement with the concept of 'flow', a concept that already exists in both water law and planning, but which has not been adequately theorised and enacted. A more comprehensive legal understanding of flow in the context of Indigenous understandings of, and claims to, water provides more sustainable and equitable legal and analytical foundations for managing future water resources issues. The article creates the space for a more culturally relevant notion of 'Indigenous water rights' and for new ways of honouring the interrelationship between water flows, meaning-making practices, and cultural continuity.
Australian Geographer, 2020
This article considers the spatial and material implications of drinking water regulation in the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. Responding to water contamination and scarcity events in remote NT communities, we argue that the politicobureaucratic edifice of uniform drinking water governance and service provision across the NT is a state-curated fiction. The article outlines the available legislative protections for drinking water supply in the NT, which include minimum quality standards, water allocation mechanisms, testing regimes, and so on. These are shown to vary significantly between geographic locations and we argue that this produces a racialised ‘archipelago’ of differentiated islands of drinking water governance (Bakker 2003. “Archipelagos and Networks: Urbanization and Water Privatization in the South.” The Geographical Journal 169 (4): 328–341). Using the Gulf country town of Borroloola as a case study, the article then examines the colonial and land rights bases of this spatial variegation, and its significance for drinking water infrastructure provision and remediation. In doing so, we consider how the entropic materialities of ageing infrastructures work to further confound effective drinking water regulations and their practical enactments. The article argues that it is crucial to understand the limits of drinking water regulation in the NT, in order to elucidate the racialised distribution of potential environmental harms, and to mitigate further toxic inheritances.
Fairness and justice in Indigenous water allocations: insights from Northern Australia
Based on findings from participatory action research, we describe a process for the development of a Strategic Indigenous Reserve (SIR) in water for Indigenous groups in the Northern Territory, Australia. In the first case study at Mataranka, we show how a 'top-down' process initiated by the Northern Territory Government (NTG) was characterised by inadequate engagement and a failure to deliver water justice or an outcome accepted by the traditional owner groups. In a second case study at Oolloo, the traditional owner groups were engaged by the NTG in a consultation process, but it commenced with a unilateral offer of a water allocation to the SIR that was not formulated in a collaborative way. As a result, traditional owners considered the process unfair, and in turn, the allocation offer was perceived as 'unfair'. Using insights from these two cases we outline an alternative and collaborative process to support engagement by decision-makers with Indigenous groups that promotes water allocations and outcomes that are just, sustainable and have broad-based community support.