A time to regroup and reassess in the Murray-Darling Basin

April 7th, 2014

Daniel Connell, Australian National University, Australia

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. A rejoinder to this article by James Horne and Chris Guest can be found here.

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.

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 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 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.

Dr. Daniel Connell is a water governance expert at the ANU and the Director of Education Programs for the UNESCO Chair of Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance.

The views expressed in this article belong to the individual authors and do not represent the views of the Global Water Forum, the UNESCO Chair in Water Economics and Transboundary Water Governance, UNESCO, the Australian National University, or any of the institutions to which the authors are associated. Please see the Global Water Forum terms and conditions here.