Search

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, irrigation infrastructure upgrades have been regarded in global policy as a solution for both water scarcity and low agricultural productivity. However, these technical "fixes" may ultimately prove to be dangerous shortcuts that do little to address the concerns of irrigators, Indigenous People, environmental groups, and local communities about water scarcity, access, security, and sustainability. In the absence of transparent and rigorous governance safeguards, irrigation efficiency upgrades can result in higher water consumption, demand, and ultimately, increased water scarcity. Upgraded irrigation systems also tend to capture return flows and redistribute them to "high value" consumptive water uses, potentially displacing other users and uses, including Indigenous Peoples. In this article, we critique current approaches to governing irrigation efficiency, using a water justice lens to identify four key insights and their implications for governance. We propose new governance pathways and options that take into consideration hydrological realities and the full range of water demands and needs. This article is categorized under:Human Water > Water GovernanceWater and Life > Conservation, Management, and AwarenessHuman Water > Water as Imagined and Represented [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impending impact of climate change upon human communities has elicited a call for 'climate justice', particularly to achieve justice for those most vulnerable to climate change and its consequences. The negotiation of global climate change agreements, including the Paris Agreement and the recent Global Environmental Pact, is increasingly engaged with critical intersections between climate change and human rights. The broader concept of 'benefit-sharing', as a means of providing defined content to human rights claims, is now central to rights discourses in this context. In international agreements, however, notions of 'benefits' and 'sharing' presently lack the critical definition, detail and specificity necessary to facilitate the realization of human rights for Indigenous and local communities. The re- articulation of rights as 'benefits' to be 'shared', moreover, risks the commodification of a previously moral imperative, subordinating human rights aspirations to global political and corporate agendas, as well as to national interests. This article provides a critical examination of the concept of 'benefit-sharing', its manifestation in REDD+ and other international regimes as a putative tool for the pursuit of climate justice, and its utility for Indigenous and local communities in the pursuit of robust rights protections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the contributions and the implications of resource extraction on the indigenous people and local communities in Australia. The current boom in the resource extraction that occurs in the traditional lands of indigenous communities will provide new opportunities to the local people in building wealth and promoting sustainable social and economic growth. However, the role of law, as well as the economic, social and institutional responses are important in ensuring that the resource extraction boom will meet the longstanding inequalities that will lead to a long-tem sustainability.