With the wisdom of hindsight: reconsidering institutional arrangements for water

This project will provide insights that will enable the development of more effective institutional arrangements for water resource allocation in the Murray-Darling Basin. It will go back to first principles and search for the most effective way to allocate water to the environment and then allocate and manage the remaining resources.

In particular, the project will seek to identify ways that a Murray-Darling Basin Agreement could have been drafted, if environmental outcomes had always been at the forefront of the minds of those responsible for developing it and they knew what we know today.

It will search for the essential ingredients of environmental and other policy reforms that build on the National Water Initiative. By exploring the options from this fundamental perspective, it is hoped that a significant contribution can be made to future debates about the way to manage Australia’s water resources

Expected project completion date: September 2009

For further information view Mike Young’s project website and access or subscribe to ‘droplets’ - occasional online discussion pieces on water policy reforms, and other related resources.

Outcomes

To summarise the nature of existing institutional arrangements in the MDB and compare them with other approaches to:

1. Identify alternative institutional arrangements and opportunities to improve management of environmental and other natural resources in the MDB with particular attention to management of water dependent ecosystems and the ongoing health of the entire system
2. Evaluate the likely effectiveness of these alternatives and search for feasible ways to implement the most attractive of these opportunities
3. Building on the MDB case study, propose a subset of Australia-wide institutional reforms for serious consideration in the National Water Initiative and other parallel reforms as they are implemented

Publications and Resources

None listed

Citation

Land & Water Australia. 2009. With the wisdom of hindsight: reconsidering institutional arrangements for water. [Online] (Updated June 16th, 2009)
Available at: http://lwa.gov.au/node/3223 [Accessed Tuesday 26th of April 2011 12:20:30 AM ].