Water Policy Reform for Sustainable Development in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia: Insights from Resilience Thinking

Abstract

This chapter explores how insights from Resilience Thinking (RT) can better inform efforts to reform water policies in directions required for sustainable development. The focus is on the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) in Australia, and particularly on reforms seeking to achieve environmentally sustainable water use. We find that the reform process remains dominated by a conventional, command-and-control, management approach that asserts predictability yet repeatedly delivers uncertainty in its place. In contrast, the approach favoured in the RT tradition for water policy reform in the MDB would involve adaptive co-management. This approach would avoid those surprises arising from the conventional approach’s misguided confidence in the predictability and controllability of the reform process, while being fit-for-purpose in dealing with the irreducible uncertainty of outcomes from intervening in the Basin’s complex social-ecological dynamics. An RT perspective highlights that shifting to adaptive co-management of the reform process would require transformation of existing governance arrangements that evolved in support of the conventional management approach. The MDB experience suggests that it is possible for such transformation to emerge through the cross-level dynamics associated with the resilience approach’s concept of panarchy. Local-level entrepreneurship by NGOs (as bridging organisations) in environmental water management has in this case established a foundation from which transformative governance of the Basin’s sustainability-driven water reform agenda continues to evolve. We conclude that RT can make important contributions to understanding how longstanding challenges in reforming water policy for sustainable development might effectively be overcome.