Federal Rivers: should we audit their governance? – Daniel Connell
(Crawford School of Economics & Government -Â 10 August 2010)
Water management is a multi-disciplinary issue. However, river management literature tends to have a strong managerial and technological focus, it does not engage with political science and therefore suffers from a lack of political awareness. This makes it an interesting issue to consider in this course, as we draw on many disciplines to try and understand complex issues.
The problem is that Murray-Darling Basin governance is thought by many people to be “world’s best practice†and yet it is still in crisis. The Murray-Darling was compared to other similar rivers, also under the jurisdiction of one federal government. Having one federal government should simplify river management, however these rivers have the same problems as rivers that cross international boundaries. In government there are layers (at different levels of government) of elected politicians interacting together, and lobbyists are able to play jurisdictions off against each other. Perhaps using network diagrams would help to understand these dynamic interactions between jurisdictions. The metaphor of a credit-card was introduced to describe management of federal rivers. It is like sharing a credit card with three or four people who you don’t like and not sharing any information with each other. This leads to a tragedy of the commons situation.
Another interesting observation is that “Droughts are a truth testâ€. That is, the reality of drought strips away the optimistic, meaningless, rhetoric that is found in river management documents. I think it will be interesting to see how this theme develops in Unravelling Complexity. At the end of the day, most systems have fundamental, underlying, physical realities that need to be accepted and which cannot be changed by fine sounding arguments. Management systems used to respond to droughts are similar to those proposed for climate change. Therefore, drought management experience can be used to get an idea about how climate management systems might work.
The term “path dependency†was used to describe the way culture and history make it difficult to change the way rivers are managed. These paths are different in different countries. Australia is dominated by irrigation based communities. USA is characterised by being litigious, having a state focus and being adverse to (federal) government intervention. South Africa is struggling with the legacy of apartheid. It is rare for reformers to analyse the real causes for why things went wrong in the past, before proposing changes to river management (also noted by Steven Cork). Cultural values and institutional legacies often determine outcomes but they are not studied sufficiently. Perhaps there is a lesson here, that to understand a complex issue you really need to understand the history behind the issue.
One of the concluding remarks was that we are trying to achieve water sustainability but no aspect of our lives is sustainable. This could have implications to the way we think about civilisations.
After the seminar I took a walk down to the lake (which drains into the Murray River) and saw some black swans.
Tools to Address Complexity
- understand cultural values
- understand the history
- understand the underlying physical reality
Other Seminars
I attended two other seminars during Stage 1
- A statistics seminar that presented a complex issue in a complicated (to me) way
- The Shift from Rights to Choices in Post-Socialist Europe – Professor Renata Salecl (this seminar was held at the ANU Centre for European Studies)