Trajectories in Australian Water Policy

This paper discusses past and current Australian water policy and management, with comparison to trends in the European Union and United States. Particular attention is paid to the policy directions made explicit in Australia’s National Water Initiative for the period 2004-2014. To move beyond description toward a stronger analytical purchase, we begin with a historical perspective, and use the concepts of policy discourses and political drivers to identify underlying motivations of policy change. The National Water Initiative is an unprecedented, multicomponent national-level policy framework, with tensions between major components and associated implementation challenges. The National Water Initiative incorporates regulatory, marketbased, informational and educational policy instruments, with demands placed at new and relatively weak administrative scales. These tensions and challenges reflect insufficiently identified differences in values, rationalities, and political imperatives, the resolution, or at least negotiation, of which will need to be attended to in implementation, as they were unresolved in the policy formulation stage. Recent experiences in the European Union and United States confirm that this situation is not confined to Australia, although specifics vary between jurisdictions. The paper concludes that apparent tensions in contemporary water policy should be regarded as predictable manifestations of concurrent experimentation with different policy styles, consistent with multiple values, contrasting political imperatives, and fundamentally different underlying discourses. Accepting this encourages an adaptive and discursive approach to water policy and management rather than a conflictual one. In an arena such as integrated water resources management, the practical manifestations of policy are inevitably political, informed by the range of values held by the many groups and individuals comprising the policy community within and outside of government. All policy directions are informed by multiple players who seek to have weight given to their own values. The reality is well stated by Davis et al. (1993):