Building trust and establishing legitimacy across scientific, water management and Indigenous cultures

ABSTRACT

This paper positions legitimacy and trust within a post-colonial theoretical frame, challenging the fundamentals of Australia’s water governance system as well as the presumptions of neutrality that underpin liberal water management principles of participation and inclusion. In a settler colonial society like Australia that until very recently excluded Indigenous people from all forms of water governance, there are significant questions to be asked about legitimacy and trust in its water regulatory regimes, guiding policy directions and the fairness of the outcomes generated by its institutions. The paper describes attempts to build cross-cultural collaborative research and management partnerships in the environmental water sector and points to formal agreements as a mechanism through which parties, including governments, can negotiate rules governing legitimacy. As an expression of self-determination and recognition of the legitimacy of Indigenous modes of governance, agreements represent a marked improvement on the exclusionary legal, policy and knowledge-production processes that have shaped our current arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• collaboration
• deliberation
• agreements
• Indigenous peoples
• Australia

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships Program funding scheme (project number FT130101145) and the National Environmental Science Program’s Northern Australia Environmental Resources Hub. In addition, I acknowledge the many Indigenous communities with whom I have worked, and Michael Douglas of the University of Western Australia who has shared the collaborative journey taken via the north Australian projects referred to above. I am also grateful to the organisers of the ACSS workshop on trust and legitimacy in environmental water management: Erin O’Donnell, Avril Horne, Lee Godden and Brian Head.

I dedicate this article to the memory of Michael Storrs, a gentle and influential scientist who was instrumental in establishing a leading Indigenous land management programme and had much to teach us about collaboration.

Declaration of interest

I have no conflicts of interest.

Notes

1. Who Are We? NBAN, http://nban.org.au/who-we-are/ (last visited 15 January 2018).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council's Future Fellowships Program (project number FT 130101145) and through funding from the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program.

Notes on contributors

Sue Jackson

Sue Jackson is a geographer with 30 years’ experience researching the social dimensions of natural resource management.  She has research interests in the social and cultural values associated with water, customary Indigenous resource rights, systems of resource governance, and Indigenous capacity building for improved participation in natural resource management and planning.