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This chapter seeks to connect discussion of human behaviours around water not to taps, toilets and timing showers, or dams and desal plants, as much discussion (very usefully) does, but to the policy processes and instruments, institutional and governance systems, and household realities that shape human and organizational behaviours toward water in a modern society and economy. The focus is on urban water, but the discussion necessarily travels to rural water and issues like energy that cannot easily be separated from water. The chapter comprises a series of linked discussions on issues that surround more singular policy debates around water, hinged on the proposition that water policy is better constructed as being about far more than just water, and where the prospects for behavioural and institutional change become both more complicated and realistic.
It seems too easy a question to ask why we are so worried about water in Australia today. The overall answer is scarcity — not just of available water, but of convenient supply options, opportunities for quick reform of infrastructure and institutions, resources both financial and informational, and capacity in the environment to receive wastewater. In the spring of 2007, parts of rural Australia are at breaking point in both house and paddock and perennial horticultural plantings may be abandoned along with small communities. Towns larger and smaller face shortages never before imagined. Cities face near-term restrictions, some inconvenience and cost, and are worried about an escalation of both.
On any international comparison Australians use water rather profligately: in rural irrigation systems, in industrial processes, at tourist resorts, on sporting fields and golf courses, and in houses and gardens. Against increasing scarcity, there is a reasonable expectation that there are ripe, low-hanging fruit in efficiency gains. Australians, at least urban ones, have never really been told to be frugal (the odd mild water restriction aside) but, rather, have been encouraged to splash it about in all sorts of ways. That is a hard legacy to shift and involves much more than changing immediate behaviours concerning appliances and orifices.
In recent years, water has become prominent in national political and policy debates in a manner unprecedented in Australian history, as a major issue at all levels of government, and through much stronger and more comprehensive national policy development in the form of the COAG-agreed National Water Initiative (NWI) and the more Commonwealth-imposed National Plan for Water Security. Why now? Drought, obviously; or, more accurately, a particularly widespread and persistent drought. That is still an incomplete answer. The slow and inexorable progress toward centralism in the Australian federal system is a major factor, sharpened by federal government of 1996–2007 but reflecting longer trends. This fulfils Deakin’s prediction regarding the states being bound to the ‘Chariot Wheels of the Commonwealth’ made in 1902 with an insightful reference to drought (see Connell 2007). Centralism combines with populist political styles and the rise of Executive power to make big, sudden policy shifts and big, sudden infrastructure announcements more likely. While the broader, stable and moderating traditions of Australian governance and political confluence are apparent (Wanna and Weller 2003), in particular sectors such as water, instability and rapid change do occur. Concerns over climate change are influential, instilling an understanding of possible permanence of water scarcity. So too is the slow and incomplete move toward seeking ecologically sustainable development, mixing concerns over water supply with arguments for environmental flows and evidence of the downsides of the way in which we deal with wastewater. Increasing demands for participatory approaches to the management of natural resources influence the way in which water is understood and managed, although this is more obvious so far in rural than urban contexts. The marketisation of water services and agencies following the neo-liberal revolution has altered both water management and expectations of relative public and private benefits (for example, Sheil and Leak 2000; Gowland and Aiken 2003). Finally, there is the fact that the easiest option — increasing supply — has run up against the constraints of a flat, dry land. The easy dams have been built.
As with most eruptions of interest in major policy issues, there are multiple factors behind the current topicality of water, however dominated by a severe drought. This is not new. Economic scrutiny of the wisdom of unthinking bulk supply of water began in earnest with Davison’s (1969) Australia wet or dry? Economic scrutiny, both sophisticated and simplistic, of investment in water infrastructure increased in intensity from the 1980s onwards, although large, panicked and arguably inefficient expenditures on engineering fixes have not ceased (although they have more in rural areas largely as a result of few remaining supply-augmentation options).
Water debates and policy activity, and, at times, real policy change, follow El Niño drought cycles with a slight time lag and depressing regularity. We do not here delve deeply into the broken past of water attentiveness — for example, post-war development-oriented reports and programs, and the 1963 and 1975 national water resources surveys — but take national water-policy debate and development and data gathering in recent times as an indicator. Water 2000, the most comprehensive set of reports and recommendations on water in the country’s history, followed the early 1980s drought (DRE 1983) but soon faded from memory and influence. So did Water Review 85, the first time water resources and use were surveyed together nationally (DPIE 1987). There was to be a ‘review 95’ and each decade hence, but this basic need and pledge was washed away in a few wet years. The early 1990s drought led to 1996 election promises from both sides to examine water resources again, and the National Land and Water Resources Audit ensued (www.nlwra.gov.au), not matching too well with previous data sets or with the ABS’s emerging Water Accounts, but very welcome nonetheless. Early 2000s drought has driven development of a new national data set, the National Water Commission’s Australian Water Resources 2005 program, one that assumedly will be maintained consistently and improved, at least until the end of the NWI’s implementation schedule of 2004–14 — an unusually long-term policy timeframe. Australia worries about and measures water when there isn’t enough of it. Maybe this time the reality of the driest inhabited continent, and the most variable rainfall on earth, will sink in permanently rather than quickly evaporate.
Physical as well as policy activity has been lumpy in time. The bulk of Australia’s water storages, rural and urban, were built in a rapid period from the 1960s (Smith 1998), in answer to multiple factors and needs — post-war development, rising populations, possible expansion of rural commodity exports, memory of previous droughts and particularly the 1940s in NSW, and especially the engineering and fossil-fuel-fired ability to build big things. That rush of dams is an infrastructure legacy that locked in and further fashioned the deep-seated water behaviours and institutional inertias that now present as problems. A hectoring focus on people’s water-use behaviour ignores the fact that these behaviours are determined, enabled and constrained by the operating environment in which they take place — just as a focus on ‘green consumerism’ can deflect attention from deep-seated inconsistencies between the function of modern economies and ecological (and arguably social) sustainability. At best, a focus on individual consumption behaviour change ignores how a modern society functions; at worst it conceals a blame-shifting onto the individual that eases the need for effective reform of patterns of production and consumption, settlement and governance.