A role for legitimacy metrics in advancing and sustaining environmental water reforms?

ABSTRACT

Legitimacy deficits have been identified as central to the ongoing challenges encountered in implementing the policy reforms introduced to reduce the environmental impacts of over-allocating water in the Murray-Darling Basin. In closing the special issue on Building and Maintaining Trust and Legitimacy in Environmental Water Management, this article draws on the preceding articles in responding to a call for the focus of evaluations of environmental water reforms to be broadened to assess their performance against metrics of legitimacy. The first aim is to consider some analytical issues to be encountered in developing legitimacy metrics for MDB environmental water reform contexts. The other aim is to explore the role of legitimacy metrics in empirical research designed to strengthen the evidence available for deciding whether and how to invest in establishing and sustaining the legitimacy of the MDB reforms. Particular reference is made to empirical studies of the consequences and antecedents of legitimacy in U.S. contexts of the law and its policing. Furnishing policy makers with reliable evidence to guide their decisions on whether and how to invest in the legitimacy of the MDB environmental water reforms will require studies of this kind that are adapted to the unique contexts of these reforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Legitimacy
• environmental water
• water policy reform
• Murray-Darling Basin
• Australia

Notes

1. The Basin states also include South Australia and the Australian Capital Territory.

2. Research across 26 countries in the European Union (Hough, Jackson et al. 2013) also found that procedural fairness influences the legitimacy of police and has a more important influence than their effectiveness.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the NSW Environmental Trust [2013/RD/0117], which does not necessarily share the views expressed herein.

Notes on contributors

Graham R. Marshall

Graham R. Marshall is an institutional economist interested in interactions between agriculture and the sustainability of natural resource use. His interest in Murray-Darling water policy began in the early 1990s when he worked at Yanco Agricultural Institute in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area.

Lisa A. Lobry De Bruyn

Lisa A. Lobry de Bruyn is a soil scientist and physical geographer. Her research has examined how landholders and natural resource management agencies can work more collaboratively to improve overall catchment health. PhD research topics she has supervised have included evaluations of community-based governance of irrigation water in Ghana, and of the outcomes from efforts to rehabilitate riparian zones in the upper Hunter River of New South Wales.