Exploring the role and decision-making behaviour of irrigation water supply authorities in Australia

ABSTRACT

Water supply authorities (WSAs) can influence the behaviour of water users and are influential actors in water governance. Despite this, their decision-making processes and the details of their interactions with other water users are seldom explored empirically in water management research. We undertook an exploratory qualitative study using semi-structured interviews and purposive sampling with WSA officials across different institutions in south-eastern Australia. Thematic analysis revealed different water allocation decision-making phases and key factors influencing each phase. The findings highlight that the decisions made by WSAs are not only based on predefined rules, but are affected by many factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Water supply authorities
• water allocation decision-making
• qualitative data analysis
• water users and suppliers
• managing limited resources
• water resource planning and management

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Ms Emma Barnard for her assistance in the initial phase of the project. They also thank Dr Nachi Nachiappan, Brett Tucker, Rosalie Auricht, Barry Schier, Tim Botten, Rod Emerson, Steve Warrell, Dr Mark Bailey, Trevor Tenant and Professor John Langford for providing data for this research.

Credit author statement

Lubna Meempatta: conceptualization, investigation, methodology, data curation, formal analysis and writing – original draft preparation. J. Angus Webb: conceptualization, methodology, writing – review and editing, funding acquisition and supervision. Louise A. Keogh: methodology, formal analysis, validation, writing – review and editing, and supervision. Avril C. Horne: conceptualization, methodology, writing – review and editing, and supervision. Michael J. Stewardson: conceptualization and supervision.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Ethics approval

Approval to carry out this research project was obtained from The Human Ethics Advisory Group (HREC) of the University of Melbourne (Ethics ID: 1750030).

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1080/07900627.2021.1982680

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

L.M. was funded through an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship. A.H. was funded through an ARC DECRA award [grant number DE180100550]. MJ, AH and AW contribution are all supported by the ARC Linkage Project Grant [LP170100598]