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Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio‐legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio‐cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro‐social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision‐making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio‐cultural risks.

ABSTRACTIncreased scrutiny and contestation over recent water allocation practices and licencing decisions in the Northern Territory (NT) have exposed numerous inadequacies in its regulatory framework. Benchmarking against the National Water Initiative shows that NT lags behind national standards for water management. We describe key weaknesses in NT’s water law and policy, particularly for Indigenous rights and interests. NT is experiencing an acceleration of development, and is conceptualised as a ‘hydrological frontier’, where water governance has institutionalised regulatory spaces of inclusion and exclusion that entrench and (re)produce inequities and insecurities in water access. Regulations demarcate spaces in which laws and licencing practices provide certainty and security of rights for some water users, with opportunities to benefit from water development and services, while leaving much of NT (areas predominantly owned and occupied by Indigenous peoples) outside these legal protections. Water allocation and planning, as well as water service provision, continue to reinforce and reproduce racialised access to (and denial of) water rights. Combining an analysis of the law and policies that apply to water for economic development with those designed to regulate domestic water supply, we present a comprehensive and current picture of water insecurity for Indigenous peoples across the NT.

ABSTRACTWater reforms in Australia over a decade ago have seen large-scale recovery of water for the environment. While the recovery programme commenced with bilateral political support, there has remained ongoing debate in the media around the recovery volume, method of recovery and delivering of this water through the river system. In November 2017, a group of academics and practitioners met to discuss the need for legitimacyas a core component of environmental water programmes. We discuss legitimacy in terms of both the process and outcome of an environmental water programme. This article, along with the others in the special issue, makes the case for investing in community support for, and demonstrating outcomes from, environmental water programmes.

ABSTRACTEnvironmental water governance is a highly contested space in which the legitimacy of institutional and legal models for water managing relies heavily, but indirectly, upon the effectiveness of community engagement. Accordingly, this article explores the relationship between legitimacy and participatory forms of decision-making in relation to public institutions with responsibility for environmental water governance in Australia. This examination explores the role that law and systems theory, working as transdisciplinary, theoretically informed praxis, can bring to an understanding of socio-ecological systems for environmental water governance. The Olifants River case study in South Africa provides a counterpoint to the investigation of environmental water institutions in the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia. As a grounded analysis of emergent forms of community engagement, the South African model illustrates how systemic affordances can introduce greater flexibility and choice, and thereby enhance the legitimacy of environmental water governance.

The Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms (1831) have been characterised by David Scott (1995) as marking the transformation of colonial Sri Lanka from one kind of political rationality – that of mercantile sovereignty – to another – that of colonial governmentality. Whilst consonant with the view that the Commission marked a moment when the colonial administration moved away from a strategic reliance on Asokan or Buddhist forms of authority in the earliest phase of British rule, we argue that there is a more nuanced genealogy to this transition. The Reforms, while directed to the administration, judicial and political institutions of the colony, also contemplated extensive commercial restructuring that inculcated a self- improvement mode into ‘everyday life’. Drawing on colonial archives, we show how elements of a logic of governmentality, such as educational, land, and fiscal reform, were utilised at different times by the colonial administration to commence the modernisationof the colony well before 1832. It is also evident that the transformation was partial, and at points strongly resisted by local Buddhist communities. Instead of marking a clear point of transformation, the Colebrooke-Cameron Reforms gave legibility and a national imprimatur to a process already in train, while providing further impetus to a socio-political rationality that had begun to shift decades prior. The secular logic of the colonial State, however, was later to unleash a movement of Sinhalese Buddhist reform and cultural re-valuation that generated, ‘a more modernised Sinhalese Buddhist nationalism to create expanding areas of social, cultural and religious life for the nationalist cause.’

SYNOPSISSocio-legal studies is a ‘heterogeneous field’1that encompasses a broad range of topics. Indeed, recently, legal scholars who regard their work as socio-legal have accepted the inclusion of less obvious and less conventional contexts and sites of socio-legal research including specifically science, technology and the environment on the basis that ‘materiality also matters in socio-legal studies’.2This paper explores the recent expansion of the category of socio-legal, or ‘law-in-context’ research to incorporate the methodologies of disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences to include material contexts, or socio-materialities. We argue for a greater recognition of socio-materiality, defined as ‘material structures embodying social relations and vice versa’,3in socio-legal research, given that we face mounting environmental challenges – not least the relationship between law, climate and effective mitigation measures. These challenges call for different methodologies, for doing legal research differently by questioning and subverting the abstractness and abstraction of law.

This article summarises research in the field of energy and natural resources law, on the subject of the sharing of costs and benefits between developer companies, governments and local communities. It addresses a new phase in the sharing of costs and benefits that is readily discerned in many countries worldwide, and which compels a shift in thinking that is centred more traditionally on environmental and resource royalty regimes.

In view of the drive in policy circles to develop northern Australia and the concomitant dependence on water resources this will involve, this article argues that environmental and distributive justice considerations are critical to the sustainable development of the region's water resources. Without appropriate provision to involve Aboriginal peoples in the planning, development and governance of water resources, northern Australia development will continue the historical exclusion of Aboriginal peoples' rights to water in Australian water resources policy. This article also draws attention to the concerning absence in the current policy for northern Australia development of lessons learned from the experience in the Murray-Darling Basin reform process with respect to environmental water. It is essential that environmental values be embedded in strategic planning and governance of water resources in northern Australia. This involves creating legal rights to environmental water to protect existing ecological values, and establishing a system of governance to promote the effective and efficient use of environmental water. Addressing these issues now before water entitlements are allocated will avoid complications and considerable expense in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the International Bar Association report, Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption, this commentary highlights the challenges in adopting a human rights framework for the REDD+ programme which is designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It identifies the potential inequities involved in mitigation efforts directed toward reducing emissions from avoided deforestation, forest degradation and associated forestry activities in terms of the potential impacts upon indigenous peoples and local forest-dependent communities. The potential impacts upon these communities are now well recognised, and issues of climate justice have been raised. The introduction of safeguards under the REDD+ model, is an important step towards incorporating human rights into the REDD+ framework. Yet even given the emphasis on securing tenure and participatory rights,  such as free, prior and informed consent, REDD+ may still entrench inequalities for some indigenous and local communities, in areas such as the utilisation of traditional knowledge in fire management.

SynopsisBy contrast to many analyses of Commonwealth v Tasmania (Tasmanian Dam case), this article focuses on what the case reveals about the damming of rivers and the role of law in constituting institutions, technologies and practices for that purpose. Australia was colonised by a civilisation that had embedded a technical utilisation of rivers within its laws. Damming rivers, as a reified practice was fostered by modern, technical knowledge. That knowledge displaced other knowledges; including Aboriginal traditional knowledge of land and waters. In 1983, law held the promise of instantiating a new dynamic for human interaction with rivers, as the Tasmanian Dam’s casejuxtaposed the international principles of environmental protection with the centralised control over water by large, bureaucratic state agencies that had developed in Australia over the twentieth century. The judgments of Chief Justice Gibbs and Justice Brennan are remarkable for the contrasting visions of dams that they reveal. Yet the dam, and even the river itself, have largely been occluded form legal memory; although the legacy of the case as a platform for later environmental legislation has been significant.

AbstractThe Kandyan Convention (1815) was definitive in consolidating British sovereignty over colonial Ceylon. The Convention and later legal instruments reflect a shift in British colonial policy regarding the acquisition of territories of Empire. Previously, British Government policy had favoured indirect rule through mercantile interests. Seizing opportunities provided by Kandyan power struggles, Governor Brownrigg, at the far reaches of Empire, implemented direct British rule. The Convention, however, straddled an emerging sense of ‘rights’ by making a specific commitment to ‘protect’ Buddhist faith and authority. The centrality of Buddhism to Sinhalese society made these provisions a powerful inducement for the Kandyan ruling elite. Nevertheless, as subsequent events revealed, the protection of these rights proved to be less important than the establishment of full British colonial control through forceful administrative measures. The Convention was, therefore, an early precursor to the modes of governance pursued by the British Government as its formal Empire expanded over the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Previously, Australia relied primarily upon stringent quarantine controls on imported plant and animal goods to prevent the entry of invasive species. However, the recent introduction of new international rules supervised by the World Trade Organisation, requiring national authorities to demonstrate a ‘sound scientific basis’ for quarantine measures implemented for plant or animal health purposes, may make it difficult for Australia to rely as heavily upon quarantine as it has done in the past. It is in this context that this article assesses the existing domestic legal and institutional framework for invasive species control as a factor of growing significance, for the management of Australia's biodiversity nd agricultural sustainability.The overview of the current Australian regulatory framework il1ustrates the widely disparate approaches to invasive species control at a state and territory level and the significant gaps and inconsistencies within each jurisdiction and across jurisdictions. In part, the disparity in regulatory approaches reflects ambiguities in the scientific term ‘invasive species’, leading to variability in the meaning of the term' invasive' when used in legislation and policy. Historically, also, the main focus of invasive species regulation has been upon the control of agricultural pests in primary industries, which produced a management framework at state government level predominantly concerned with identifying and managing single pest species in the context of agricultural production. By contrast, the Commonwealth Government's role has largely been confined to ‘indirect governance’ in the form of providing policy coordination and funding incentives. While the need to move to a holistic, environmental management, focus is clearly recognised—and there are recent efforts in this direction—the scope of the risks associated with invasive species in Australia arguably requires not only greater institutional co-ordination but also a significant change towards a nationally-led proactive regulatory approach.This article analyses the extent to which the current legislative and regulatory framework has adopted best practice environmental management principles to this end, as well as recent recommendations for an enhanced national strategy emanating, from the Senate Inquiry considering amendments to the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, Cth [EPBC Act]. The Senate Inquiry recommended reforms, which while they signal a move toward a more coherent national, framework, arguably do not go far enough in addressing the growing risks posed by invasive species. In particular, the recommended reforms neglect the opportunity offered by the EPBC Act to define a decisive role, for the Common wealth invasive species regulation, guided by well-accepted environmental principles that promote long-term sustainability.