Water as a source of innovation in environmental policy and management

As the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, and 30th anniversary of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro, were celebrated in June 2022, we take the opportunity to consider the influences of water in approaches to environmental governance and management. These environmental management approaches are not exclusive to water research and management, but have been highly influential, to the benefit of other sectors.

These pioneering Stockholm and Rio de Janeiro international conventions had a major role in setting worldwide directions for sustainable development, climate change, recognition of Indigenous peoples, impact assessment, biological diversity, and Agenda 21 (about local development), and on many other topics such as forest management, aspects of wildlife, fish stocks, and arresting desertification. Despite much emphasis on rational planning, the Stockholm conference also offered some seeds of bottom-up management, and strengthening institutions especially for the less industrialised countries (United Nations 1973, Action plan for the human environment, recommendation 7). The anniversary conference, Stockholm+50, co-hosted by Sweden and Kenya, has emphasised the global interconnectedness of the environment, and the ‘triple crisis’ of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution. The Presidents, in their concluding plenary address, highlighted re-energising commitments and relationships, system-wide change in the way our current system works to contribute to a healthy planet, and accelerating system-wide transformations in high impact sectors (Stockholm+50 Presidents final remarks to plenary 2022). This highlights much greater attention to systemic connections than was present 50, even 30, years ago. Nevertheless, although water is recognised in other major international initiatives (especially the International Decade for Action on Water for Sustainable Development 2018–2028, and two of the Sustainable Development Goals),¹ the seminal Stockholm, Rio de Janeiro, and Stockholm+50 conferences have placed relatively little emphasis on water beyond the human needs perspective of drinking water and sanitation.

Water has particular characteristics that have helped to drive directions and innovations in environmental management, policy and governance. Water is the most fundamental of human needs, in that an individual human can survive only a few days without it. It is also crucial to plant and animal life, part of atmospheric processes, and essential to life within soils. Water for sanitation is vital to human health. Water is also integral to many production processes, in primary and secondary industry, and hence to livelihoods and economies. Water moves across rather than being limited within specific parcels of land. Typically rivers cross the lands of many owners or managers, and quite a number cross jurisdictions, including international boundaries. In other words, rivers are seldom under single ownership and control. While river courses have somewhat fixed locations (changing over time owing to hydrological processes), the water in them moves, and quantities vary seasonally and over longer periods. Meanwhile groundwater, another very important source of water for human and needs, also transcends property and jurisdictional boundaries, has multiple users, and lacks visibility. All of this means that water needs to be shared, among humans, and with the environment. This applies both to the quantity of water (leave enough for others downstream, or in the aquifers), and to the quality (do not pollute the water needed by other people, animals, and plants).

The management of water is ancient, with water, and land-water interactions, deeply embedded in many cultures’ belief systems and associated with social and cultural rules governing access and use. Sacred bodies of water, and sacred forests that protect water sources, have been documented in many parts of the world, especially India, several African countries, and also China and Central Asia. In Australia's and Aotearoa-New Zealand's Indigenous societies, water plays prominent roles in belief systems, cultural identity, and customary law. The customary rules many societies have created to share water for irrigation is one of the most prominent – and ancient – types of commons. In Bali, the subak is a cooperative social system well embedded with religious beliefs and ceremonies, to manage irrigation water.

Collaboration

Because water itself is seldom ‘owned’, and the many lands rivers tend to cross involves multiple owners, collaboration has been pioneered in this field. While some collaborations are shorter-term, many have achieved long-term status as forms of governance. Australia’s statutory Murray Darling Basin Authority, and Catchment Management Authorities in NSW and Victoria, are institutionalised examples. International examples include the Mekong River Commission, and the International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine. Among the many non-statutory examples is the Mississippi River Network in the USA, a coalition of over 55 organisations. In Australia, a pioneering example was the SEQ Healthy Waterways Partnership, which in 2017 merged with SEQ Catchments to become the regional body for NRM, Healthy Land and Water. Many collaborations involve large networks, enabling rich participation from community-based groups and NGOs alongside government departments and often industry.

Integrated catchment (watershed) management

Because water quantity and quality are so strongly influenced by what occurs on land, integrated catchment management (integrated watershed management in the USA) was developed as a way to manage for complex land-water interactions, ideally through collaborations. Integrated Catchment Management was first adopted in Australia in New South Wales’ Hunter catchment in 1950, and was first legislated in South Australia’s Water Resources Act 1976. It was adopted, in various forms, in most of Australia’s states and territories during the 1980s (Bellamy et al. 2002). In Aotearoa-New Zealand, adoption of integrated catchment management is uneven (Feeney et al. 2010), though this may be related to integrated management – not specific to water - being required under the Resource Management Act 1991. The term integrated catchment management is now largely replaced internationally with Integrated Water Resources Management, a very similar concept, not so geographically limited to specific catchments, but nevertheless emphasising land-water interactions and collaboration. An important collaborative domain is transboundary river management.

Market-based instruments

Another area of environmental management and policy driven by water problem solving is the pricing of water and creation of tradable rights in water, under a type of ‘market-based instrument’. These have been highly influential in Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, where they were intended to allow market decisions to replace challenging and contentious top-down government allocation decisions. In the Murray-Darling Basin, water is detached from land so a landowner can sell their water rights, temporarily or permanently, to other water users. The logic was that water would be drawn through trading to the highest (economic) value uses, while allowing governments to increasingly tighten ‘caps’ to leave more water for the environment. An unintended consequence was that farmers who had not used their total irrigation allocations in the past could now sell their unused portion ensuring that every drop of water was used. Such a hybrid neoliberal approach was found to test achievement of sustainability goals, due to privileging industry and shifting risk and costs to future generations, through inadequate regulation, neglect of public consultation, lack of transparency, and weak impact assessment (Baldwin et al. 2019).

Legal rights to rivers

A newer domain, reflected in one of AJEM’s recent publications (Talbot-Jones and Bennett 2022), is legislative innovation in granting legal rights to rivers. As Talbot-Jones and Bennett explain, a river or water system is granted legal standing and a legal representative to exercise its rights. This is, of course, consistent with the logic of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s creation of its office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, from 1986, in that the Commissioner can act as advocate for the environment.

Systems thinking in water management

Given its importance in landscapes and to society, water has also been prominent in systems thinking in environmental science and management. Our awareness of the ‘water cycle’ is one of the most familiar examples of systems thinking in environmental science and management, and behaviour of weather and climate are often given as examples of complex adaptive systems. All forms of systems thinking can be found in water management. The now outdated distinctions between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ systems, and ‘open and ‘closed’ systems, aligned with assumptions that influences are discernible and controllable, and that the material (e.g. building infrastructure) are readily separable from the ‘subjective ‘dimensions (public perspectives) within systems. The revolution in complexity theory, focusing on the concept of complex adaptive systems (and also related to resilience), has not been led by water, but water has often been used in examples, especially the early work on lake dynamics (e.g. Carpenter and Cottingham 1997, and much subsequent work). As Pahl-Wostl (2007) argues, water management needs to move from control approaches to recognise that the systems to be managed are complex adaptive systems. While catchment management implies working within a bounded system, complex adaptive systems thinking highlights interactions among multiple levels within each system (e.g. nested stream, tributary, river, systems, and multiple levels of governance) and thinking outside the obvious jurisdictional and physical boundaries to consider many types of influence and opportunities for management. Thus typical instruments are adaptive management, enhancing polycentric governance, and fostering social learning.

Integration of approaches

Under the complex demands of applying integrated catchment or integrated water resources management in practice, it is common to use environmental management approaches in combination, especially under overarching strategies. In Australia, the National Water Initiative (NWI – COAG 2004) set the stage for water reform, providing a comprehensive framework and principles for sustainable water management. It featured: statutory based water planning that contributes to environmental and other public outcomes and reduces over-allocated or stressed water systems; establishment of a system of water rights and trade; pricing for water storage and delivery enabling cost recovery; and better management of urban water demands including water use efficiency. A fundamental aspect of the NWI was commitment to consultation with users, inclusive of Indigenous people, in water planning. The NWI specified that water planning would provide for Indigenous access to water resources, and that water plans will incorporate ‘indigenous social, spiritual and customary objectives’ (s 52).

Integrated approaches can be challenging, especially when applied on a large scale. After a concerted implementation effort by state governments with national support over ten years, much has been achieved under the NWI, with allocation decisions generally based on much better data. Even so, the current situation is less than ideal, partly due to a lack of a nation-wide independent and public oversight insisting on transparency and accountability. A 2020 review of water reform identified the need for strengthened capacity to deal with droughts, floods and shocks; improved adaptability to a changing climate; improved fit-for-purpose regulatory, governance and management arrangements; and use of the best available information in decision making (DAWE 2022). This comes closer to applying complex adaptive systems thinking in water management.

The articles in this issue illustrate most of these facets: how decision-making occurs in the realities of a complex adaptive system (especially one where assumptions of control continue); enhancing stakeholder decision-making processes; improved information for land and water management; and communication.

Editors note

Sometimes it is a relief to be contradicted. The recent Australian election suggests our last editorial, ‘Parochialism, politics and the planet’ (written with Thilak Mallawaarachchi) was too pessimistic. Australian electors put high priority on climate action and voted for ‘planet’. Memories of the effects of bushfires and floods are strong. An unprecedented number of Greens candidates and independents saying they have listened to their electorates’ concerns about climate policy and inaction, have been elected.

Articles in this issue

By coincidence, four of the five articles in this issue focus on aspects of decision-making specifically about water, and the other, while using a different case, is highly relevant to the challenges of reaching agreement among stakeholders that are inherent in water management. Arun Elias, Mahesh Gupta, and Alina Haider adapt a method called ‘evaporating cloud’, a tool that lays out the stakeholder arguments in a conflict in order to highlight the underlying assumptions behind the arguments, contrasts and areas of agreement. To test the potential in environmental conflict analysis, they apply it to a long-standing environmental and transport planning conflict in New Zealand, the Transmission Gully motorway proposal to connect Wellington with the central North Island. They conclude that the method has potential in environmental conflicts, as it is systematic, easy to use, and highlights the core aspects of a complex conflict.

Using detailed analysis of inquiry testimonies, Omer Yezdani, Louis Sanzogni, and Luke Houghton apply complexity theory to an analysis of the decision-making of four dam managers during Brisbane’s 2011 floods. They identify a complex and emergent quality to the decisions made under extreme pressure, under conditions of great uncertainty. Small decisions made early in the sequence had compounding and unfortunate effects, locking in a course of action. The authors argue that the cascading patterns of decision-making show how the emergent complexity comes to control the situation, requiring deviation from existing strategies laid out in a manual. The authors argue that it is important to understand emergent strategy formation, especially considering disaster situations where many unpredictable things happen that do not fit neatly into prescribed strategies. Further research and analysis of cases would contribute to organisation science and management with respect to managing crises and handling risk effectively.

Bernadette Proemse, Iain Koolhof, Richard White, Leon Barmuta, and Christine Coughanowr assess nutrient sources and loads across the greater River Derwent catchment, one of the largest river basins in Tasmania, and the main source of drinking water to Hobart, the state capital. In recent years signs of nutrient stress including blue–green algae, and taste and odour issues in Hobart’s water supply, have raised concerns about river water quality. The authors use two methods to assess nutrient production loads: point source effluent data combined with estimates for diffuse sources using land-use data. They found that five fish farms are the main point source of total nitrogen and total phosphorus, exceeding contributions from sewage treatment and other sources, while agriculture is the main diffuse source of phosphorus and forestry the main diffuse source of nitrogen. Their findings highlight the need for improved nutrient management, and for more frequent and continuous water quality monitoring.

Michael Joy, Douglas Rankin, Lara Wöhler, Paul Boyce, Adam Canning, Kyleisha Foote, and Pierce McNie used a ‘grey water footprint’ method in Canterbury, New Zealand, to quantify the amount of water needed to dilute nitrogen leached past the root zone to meet receiving water nitrate standards per milk production unit. In this region land use has intensified rapidly, and there is high reliance on groundwater for drinking water. Their results show that the extent of pasture-based intensive dairy farming in Canterbury is unsustainable and is leading to levels of groundwater pollution that render much of the groundwater unsafe to drink and pose a significant risk both to human health and the market perception of the New Zealand dairy industry.

Recycled water offers an opportunity to improve the supply of drinking water. However in Australia, public opposition is common. Ben Posetti, Anna Hurlimann, Aaron Tkaczynski, Melanie Randle, and Sara Dolnicar used a national online survey to experiment with types of message, those in which the benefit of having recycled water accrues to the individual (egoistic messages) and those in which the benefit is derived by others (altruistic messages). Further variants of the messages explored the relative merits of messages about the consequences of using recycled water (delivery-based messages) and those focused on the desirability of the consequences of using recycled water (desirability-based messages). Findings from the study can be used to develop advertising campaigns that improve public opinion towards recycled water and increase rates of willingness to use recycled water should it be introduced into public water supplies. The authors found that both egoistic and altruistic types of message were equally effective. However delivery-based messages were more effective than desirability-based messages. Meanwhile print advertisements, a cost-effective marketing channel that relies on images and limited text, are effective in influencing community acceptance and willingness to use recycled water.

Editors’ tip: systematic literature reviews

Literature provides the context for your research. A literature review involves a critical look at the existing research that is significant to your work, providing the argument for why your research is needed. You should not just explain to the reader what research has already been done, but your ‘aim should be to show why your research needs to be carried out, how you came to choose certain methodologies or theories to work with, and how your work adds to the research already carried out’ (AIT 2005, 3). Literature reviews may be empirical, theoretical, critical/analytic and/or methodological. All literature reviews should be based on thorough searches of the literature using advanced search tools now available within scientific databases (e.g. Web of Science, Scopus).

Systematic literature reviews are increasingly being published in journals as they use a ‘scientific method’ and follow a traditional methods-results/findings-discussion format. The concept originated in medical research as a way to quickly identify any new research to justify a new study. However, they are appearing more frequently in other disciplines including environmental management. Systematic literature reviews are increasingly popular with PhD candidates as they are increasingly encouraged to do a thesis by publication, and it can be difficult to publish a conventional PhD literature review. That motivation aside, our recommendation is to use conscious and systematic search approaches to conduct a literature review, and to choose carefully which type of review really applies to your work.

Both conventional and systematic literature reviews have important roles, but what is the difference? Table 1 presents some important distinctions.

Table 1. Distinctions between conventional and systematic literature reviews.

	Conventional literature review	Systematic literature review
Purpose	Provide a sound and informative conceptual background to the topic. This usually shows how others have defined and considered the topic (e.g. theoretical positioning), what predecessors have found (empirical findings), and the trends in theory development over time. The review would usually highlight key debates, and identify a gap in knowledge which your research proceeds to fill. Provide an advanced overview of a field, including critical thinking about the literature covered.	To locate and compare empirical evidence on a particular topic to clearly identify major findings and establish research gaps. To offer replicability, so that others can, in principle, reproduce the study. Systematic literature reviews are regarded as empirical research, based on secondary data (other literature).
Research question	Arises from the review. More exploratory.	A clear research question precedes and guides the review but may be refined as a result of the review.
Methodology	Authors use key words to search databases, relying on their knowledge of a field or being more exploratory. Scholarly peer-reviewed literature should dominate but you may use relevant grey literature such as reports and conference proceedings. The method of the search is assumed and authors are trusted to have followed a thorough procedure and found relevant work. Key points rather than exhaustive detail are sought.	Guidelines such as PRISMA (2021) are followed. The search methodology must be defensible and presented clearly. Uses key words or phrases for the search. Depending on the number and relevance of documents resulting from the search, inclusion (e.g. after a certain date) and exclusion (e.g. non-peer reviewed) criteria can be used to narrow the focus. A record is kept to demonstrate the results of each search step. You report on the methods of search and analysis of the articles in the methods section of your article. You may report results of the articles reviewed according to theoretical frameworks, themes, methods used, and geographical location, etc. Supplementary strategies might be used, such as backtracking through literature cited in the works found or searching for theses, conference proceedings and reports.
Results	Themes are identified arising from the search, such as evolution, historical development, or trends of relevant concepts, and research gaps identified.	The process is often demonstrated through a flow chart illustrating number of articles at each level of search, as well as a table including the most relevant articles. Results in a synopsis of major findings and gaps.
Limitations	Relies heavily on author judgement and diligence.	Most databases are limited to journal articles, however Google Scholar includes books, book chapters, and some reports. Deliberately focussed, and narrows in scope through the process.
Traps	A temptation to review everything related to your topic, and going down ‘rabbit holes’. Or to read favourite articles, and those already well known or highly cited, to the possible exclusion of important others.	Missing important literature that does not quite follow the search terms chosen. A temptation to focus on quantitative data, e.g. how many articles have been published in what countries, whether or not this information is relevant to the issues being explored.

Finding a good recent literature review about your topic is like a gem: it encapsulates a succinct overview of the state of play and saves valuable time in your own research. No matter which system you use, organise your information around ideas, not around the authors or researchers. Focus on the research itself, show how different research is related and how it relates to your own research (AIT 2005).

Guides to writing literature reviews are widely available on the web. For examples of systematic literature reviews, check Kellens, Terpstra, and de Maeyer (2013) and Plummer et al. (2012).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Clean water and sanitation (goal 6), i.e. water for drinking and domestic uses, and life below water (goal 14), a goal that is focused on oceans despite the importance of life in and alongside rivers too.