Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-­‐Darling Basin Daniel Connell Australian National University, Australia Reflections on water reform in the Colorado and Murray-­‐Darling Basins This essay is part of a series of fifteen ‘reflections’ papers from the September 2013 Workshop: Rivers of Reform – Lessons from the Colorado and Murray Darling Basin Water Reforms. The purpose of the series was to take stock of lessons learned from the past two decades of sustainable water reform, stimulate continued exchange across the basins, and promote more structured comparisons to learn from similarities and differences, and successes and failures. Keywords: Systems thinking, principles for water reform, integrated water resources management Decision makers in the Murray-Darling Basin
and in the Colorado Basin both recently
succeeded after a long period of haggling on
modifications
to
their
water
sharing
arrangements. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan
and the Colorado’s Minute 319 are seen as
significant achievements given the difficulty in
reaching such agreements. However, in the
opinion of many critics these modifications are a
long way from what will be needed if the climate
change predictions for both river systems prove
to be realistic.
With this future challenge in mind I argue that a
comparative analysis of the Murray Darling
Basin and the Colorado River system would
provide a better understanding of the way in
which
two
governance
systems
with
fundamental cultural similarities are likely to
respond when pushed a long way beyond what
would be currently politically acceptable.
The lawyer Doug Kenny recently argued that the
governance arrangements applying to the
Colorado River based on the compact negotiated
in 1922 and known as the law of the river might
not survive challenge in the United States
Supreme Court. He suggests that such a decision
could result if the court found that the compact
was based on inaccurate river flow data that
overestimated average flows and a lack of
knowledge of the long-term impacts of climate
change. Such a verdict would produce a massive
political crisis in the United States south-west as
the Colorado basin states attempted to rewrite
the water sharing agreement with no agreed
framework for negotiations.
In comparison, it may seem that the Murray
Darling Basin has better prospects of surviving
its predicted climatic future given that its water
sharing arrangements are based on proportions
of available flow rather than the more rigid
principles applied to the Colorado. However, the
capacity to take advantage of that institutional
resource is restrained by political realities;
namely powerful stakeholders who give little
indication that they would accept major
reductions in their water allocations.
Suggested Citation: Connell, D. (2014), ‘Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-­‐Darling Basin’, Reflections on water reform in the Colorado and Murray-­‐Darling Basins, Global Water Forum, Canberra, Australia. Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-Darling Basin
The strength of resistance, and the capacity of
self interested groups to redefine the conceptual
framework that shapes how debates are
conducted and decisions made, is indicated by
the shift in thinking about the fundamental
principles that should apply to water
management that has occurred in Australia in
recent years.
Put forward under the title of ‘The Nine
Rejections’ the comments below provide my
summary of the changes that I detect in the
public policy debate about the Murray-Darling
Basin (MDB) in recent years. The arguments are
framed with the MDB in mind but the basic
ideas that are being contested are of much wider
relevance. Among other things the revamped
Australian water management paradigm, as
reflected in the new arrangements now
incorporated into the revised Basin Plan,
involves:
1)
Rejection of the core principle of the Rio
1992 conference that long term economic
well-being depends on implementing
sustainable management of the environment
to halt ongoing decline. Working from that
foundation, the National Water Initiative
(NWI) was an enlightened attempt to define
what would be needed if we are to have
productive
industries
and
liveable
settlements in the MDB twenty to thirty
years from now. The first imperative was to
determine how much water and what
management rules would be needed to
achieve sustainability at the level of
modification that is deemed by society to be
appropriate. Water left over was then
available for production. Instead, however,
we have adopted the historical level of
development as the starting point for
policies such as the Basin Plan and then
calculated the politically acceptable amount
that can be taken from that. Not surprisingly
the usual answer is ‘not much’.
2) Rejection of the understanding that
significant water reform is a cultural project.
The European Union’s Water Framework
Directive – and the reform package
introduced in the MDB in the late 1980s –
recognised that fundamental changes to the
cultural values that people and their
governments bring to discussions about
water policy and management are needed if
reform is to take place. This requires new
thinking about the purpose of water
management, which stakeholders have a
legitimate claim to be taken into account,
and the type of governance system that
should be used for water policy development
and management. Changes to education,
communications, and citizen involvement
strategies
way
beyond
the
limited
consultation and tightly controlled media
management evident in the Basin Plan
development process are required.
3) Rejection of the agenda of the Council of
Australian Government’s (COAG) 1994
water reforms and National Water Initiative
which was to first restore sustainability at a
socially defined level of modification and
then use water trading to maximise benefits
to society by trading seamlessly across
borders and between uses with the water
that was left. The goal of achieving
sustainability has been abandoned. Now the
talk is merely of protecting key assets (there
are more comments on this issue below).
With water trading also, despite the
undeniable financial arguments in favour of
system wide reform, success has only been
partial. In the agricultural sector there
continue to be significant restrictions to
trading across borders. Trading between
uses is even more restricted. It is likely that
Adelaide and Melbourne would have built
desalinization plants no matter what the
circumstances. If they had been able to buy
water without restriction across borders and
from irrigated agriculture, however, those
desalinization plants would have been much
smaller in size saving many billions of
Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-Darling Basin
dollars (the amount of water needed by
cities
is
relatively
insignificant
by
comparison with agriculture: water for
irrigation in the MDB pre-drought averaged
11-12,000 gigalitres (GL) per year while
annual consumption for Sydney with four
million people is about 600 GL).
4) Rejection of the whole-of-hydrological
system
approach
to
planning
and
management that is the core of the NWI. In
recent policies governments have reverted to
a focus on intensive management to protect
‘key assets’. A focus on assets encourages the
view that as long as it looks OK for the
majority of voters it is acceptable. Once
separated from a whole-of-system ecological
approach to sustainable management,
criteria to measure success become very
vague. Further, once separated from a
context it becomes easy to define an ‘asset’
as an optional extra to be afforded only if its
preservation does not involve too much
political pain for decision makers. This
ignores the hard won understanding that
environmental conditions are the result of
many interacting factors. Managing for
defined targets in specific sites neglects the
processes that shape outcomes in the longer
term or for the whole ecological system. An
example is the crucial relationship between
stream channels and their floodplains –
central to riverine health – which has been
made more tenuous by the loss of small and
medium level floods.
5) Rejection of the need for Integrated
Catchment Management (ICM) because of
the imperative to take account of state
political demands for autonomy in land
management and regional policy under the
legislative framework established by the
Water Act 2007/8. The ICM concept is the
core of the international discourse about
how to minimise losses and negative
impacts, and share costs and benefits in
highly developed landscapes. As was
recognised in the COAG 1994 water reform
package, ICM should be central to
discussions about protecting water quality
and making trade-offs between competing
stakeholders.
For
example,
some
stakeholders, irrigators, urban centres, and
environmentalists may focus on streams and
wetlands in order to maximise flows instream. While others, such as dryland
farmers, tree plantation developers, and
environmentalists interested in promoting
vegetation growth for biodiversity, may want
to maximise water retained in the landscape.
Without an ICM framework, decisions over
such conflicts become little more than an
expression of raw political power.
6) Rejection of the beneficiary pays principle
which underpinned the water privatization
programs implemented in all MDB states in
the 1990s. Irrigation communities (through
organizations such as Central Irrigation
Trust in South Australia, Goulburn Murray
Water in Victoria, and Murray Irrigation in
New South Wales) were gifted established
regional delivery infrastructure as sunk
assets
and
legally
enhanced
water
entitlements (now of great value) at little
cost to them in return for a commitment
that they would fund future infrastructure
maintenance and development. At the time
within water management circles, there was
much cynical comment that irrigation
communities would find a way to once again
access the public purse after public memory
of the deal had faded. That has now been the
case with the provision of $5.9 billion for
infrastructure through the Water for the
Future program.
7) Rejection (or reversal) of the precautionary
principle that was central to the Rio Earth
Summit in 1992 and all recent major
programs of water reform. Originally this
required
care
that
management
interventions be assessed for the risk that
they would trigger difficult-to-reverse
ecological
threshold
changes
(many
examples have been experienced world-wide
Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-Darling Basin
and in the MDB resulting in considerable
loss of biodiversity and productivity). Now
the imperative is to justify taking water from
the historical level of development. Working
with this reversal of the original
precautionary principle there is enormous
political pressure to show benefits in the
short term (preferably measured in dollars)
for any water returned back to the
environment; even though in most cases it is
scientifically realistic to expect only diffuse
longer term benefits that are often hard to
link to specific interventions.
8) Rejection of the core NWI principle that
irrigators are only one of a number of
legitimate stakeholders. The principle
central to the NWI is that there should be an
orderly process for managing competing
priorities. However, during the Basin Plan
consultation process protests by irrigators
caused the Commonwealth Government to
restore irrigation communities to the
position of primary stakeholder that they
held before the reform wave of the 1980s.
Revision of the draft Basin Plan has been
driven by the need to get them onside.
Government spending on desalinization
plants for Adelaide and Melbourne are really
subsidies to irrigators to protect them
against political pressure to allow urban
water managers to purchase water
entitlements from over-allocations gifted to
irrigators in the past.
9) Rejection of the urgency of reform.
Agreement to 2019 as the commencement
date for implementation of the Basin Plan
with a five-year phase in period to 2024
shows that governments do not think that
reform is urgent. This timetable reflects the
need to wait until the fifteen year water
sharing plans put in place by the
governments of New South Wales (NSW)
and Victoria in 2004 have expired (NSW
had ten year plans but they have now been
extended to fifteen). Those water sharing
plans locked in the high rates of extraction
that have brought the MDB river system to
its current environmental condition. In
parallel, however, the same governments
were negotiating the National Water
Initiative which was approved by the Council
of Australian Governments in June 2004.
The NWI timetable indicated that water
reform was urgent. Among many other
things governments agreed that by
December 2007 they would develop water
management plans that would incorporate ‘a
clear path to sustainability’ for all major
hydrological systems. What sense should we
make of the fact that the two projects are
very different in content?
Conclusions
We have lost the conceptual framework of
ecological systems thinking, or resilience
thinking, that underpinned the water reform
movement of the past twenty or thirty years.
New options such as nexus thinking have
emerged but the principles behind them are
vague.
Without
strong
principles
and
frameworks that can be used as criteria for the
assessment of the various arguments being put
forward by the many interested parties,
discussion about potential reform is likely to
become even more diffuse than is already the
case. The comments put forward above were
prepared as a response to Australian
developments, however, I think they are of wider
relevance. The United States has historically
been one of the main centres for research into
the conceptual principles that should apply to
water management. From an international
perspective, after all the debate and innovation
of recent decades, we need to stand back and
reassess how we should work to achieve
sustainable water management. A comparative
MDB-Colorado project re-examining the basic
principles would be a good start.
Time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-Darling Basin
References
1.
Kenney, Douglas S. 2010. Rethinking the Future of the Colorado River. Interim Report of the
Colorado River Governance Initiative. Boulder: Natural Resources Law Center, Western Water Policy
Program. http://www.rlch.org/archive/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/CRGI-Interim-Report.pdf
About the author(s)
Dr. Daniel Connell, a water governance expert at the ANU and the Director of Education Programs for
the UNESCO Chair of Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance.
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