What follows is a sharply summarised and simply characterised view of overlapping phases of water management, policy and institutional forms in Australia, which roughly accord with approaches taken to other natural resources such as energy, and many other policy problems (for example, Bolton 1980; Frawley 1994; Connell 2007).
Indigenous Australian water law and management, although non-urban, have the longest pedigree and argument for ‘fit’ to the Australian environment, on the basis of impressive longevity. It can be surely expected to contain — although this is shamefully unexplored — a great variety of geographically and culturally defined variation. The difficulty of translating traditional Indigenous water management to contemporary urban settings is immense, except in a general value-shift sense, but the reality of 50 000-plus years of human–water interaction cannot be ignored.
Early Australian urban-water management was characterised by (i) rapid development of an understanding of the variable Australian hydrological environment, and (ii) a mostly localised and ad hoc approach to capture, provision and disposal of water. As populations grew and production demands and technologies drove increased water use, issues of adequacy and safety of supply became apparent.
The rise of public-health considerations in cities — potable supply and safe treatment of human and other wastes carried in water — defined the imperative for development of reliable, widely (if not universally) accessible bulk supply and disposal of water and related wastes. Though nascent technologies could have prompted a policy of widespread independent water management at household level and in some industrial settings, there was instead a move toward large dams, bulk piped supply, and (later) big-pipe waste disposal and mass treatment of wastes.
An ‘engineered ascendency’ (Powell 2000) and institutionalisation of bulk water capture, supply and waste disposal was the result, beginning in the late nineteenth century and implemented vigorously. In major urban settings, independent statutory authorities (water boards) became highly professional, powerful and purposeful organizations, with a singular and highly effective focus. In small towns, the same overall approach was taken, with local government rather than state agencies taking responsibility.
Rethinking these Leviathans began in the 1980s and gathered pace in the 1990s, amid rising concerns around cost-effectiveness, organisation flexibility, environmental impacts and, above all, economic efficiency. Agencies were put on a more commercial footing through corporatisation (in mandate, form and style of title) and outsourcing or privatisation of ancillary functions. Some revision of supply-oriented mandates occurred, and marginal efficiency measures were pursued. Whether these revised institutional forms equal a significant shift in emphasis remains to be seen.
These ‘phases’ reflect a sequence of shifts in policy styles and institutional forms; however, they are not strict or exclusive. Indigenous water management is extant, and in some areas pure state provision exists alongside corporatisation. Overall, they are not inconsistent with broader trends in public administration and governance, in their social goals and the organised means of addressing these.
There have been few big shifts in the underlying institutions — the rules of the game — in the history of Australian water management, much policy and management turbulence aside. This is to be expected: institutions, as opposed to the organisation that manifests them, by definition, do not change often and only occasionally quickly. Australia’s first environmental regulation affecting water came quickly when Governor Phillip acted on the belief that faeces were out of place in the Tank Stream, and much has happened since. But the rules of the games, basic institutional forms, are slower to change. There is considerable path dependency in institutions — we generally operate within an institutional system that is far more consistent with past rather than present knowledge and imperatives. This inertia resides in modes of understanding, statute law, organisational and professional expectations and norms, and physical infrastructure. Modern Australian cities have developed assuming abundant low-priced water and energy, and the urban structure, housing forms and transport options that abundance make possible. Those assumptions have only recently been questioned. With only around 2 per cent of the building stock changing each year, and major public and private infrastructure projects having functional lives of many decades, rapid change is difficult, especially in the myopia of modern politics (see Marsh and Yencken 2004).
In rural Australia, the shift from Indigenous management to British riparian doctrine was the first big institutional change, and the second occurred in the years around Federation consistent with Deakin’s injunction to overturn riparian doctrine and invest control of water with the Crown. Little changed fundamentally until recent years when concerns over economic efficiency, environmental quality and limits to supply saw management of water shifted toward private control and property rights (including environmental) began to be refashioned. Whether this current phase of institutional change will be as profound as some hope remains to be seen (see various contributions in Hussey and Dovers 2007).
In urban Australia, white occupation was the first big shift, but the early years of establishing white governance saw largely ad hoc urban water management. The second institutional shift was the rise of large state agencies entrusted with water and sanitation, beginning in the late nineteenth century and becoming formalised behemoths of unquestioned authority and expertise. Importantly, the logic was not so much water supply, but public health, borne of the post-Industrial Revolution wave of urbanisation, microbial diseases, scientific understanding of disease, and distributional equity, to offer all citizens a safe and reliable supply of potable water. The third shift, not unlike in rural Australia, is partial and ongoing: the corporatisation of water-supply agencies, application of pricing mechanisms, and partial incorporation of environmental constraints. Consistent with neo-liberalism, the most significant and effective policy expression came from the National Competition Policy-inspired COAG water reforms of the 1990s (for example, Sheil and Leak 2000; Smith 1998; Cater 1998). The social and institutional logic shifted, although the shift was not widely understood. While public health and basic service provision were still important, economic efficiency of operations became an underlying imperative, given direction by the corporatisation of water agencies within statutory frameworks that gave greater primacy to financial return. Citizens became consumers. As traditional statutory authorities, these agencies were thought by reformers to be inflexible and wasteful (and certainly that critique held in some ways); the answer was to make them more like the idealised private firm. As with other manifestation of corporatisation and privatisation, much depends on the quality and comprehensiveness of the statutory framework, and whether public-good functions such as long-term monitoring, public health, infrastructure planning, and so on are catered for (for example, Richardson and Bosselman 1999).
This indicates a widespread issue in natural-resource management, and many other policy sectors, where significant institutional change can occur under the guise of policy and management changes that are perceived to be, or sold as, a relatively straightforward matter of instrument choice or organisational form. Market-oriented policy approaches, especially those that refashion property rights, are not simply ‘another option in the policy toolbox’, but are transformative policy options that carry with them institutional change (Connor and Dovers 2004). Property-rights instruments — individual transferable quota in fisheries, tradable water rights in water — shift the policy logic from distributional equity plus some ecological consideration, to economic efficiency plus sustainability concerns. Those impacted by a new policy regime, and indeed sometimes those proposing and implementing it, may not fully understand that crucial shift. Trouble usually ensues. Moreover, such market instruments are not themselves an end or a singular means, but first require support from other, co-ordinated policy instruments (statutory, communicative, informational), and second are pro-sustainability only as an efficient allocation mechanism within a robust sustainability (scarcity) limit. Also, the standard conditions for any functioning market — good information, clear property rights, reasonable symmetry, and so on — are required. This basic economics is often assumed away or left un-discussed in the establishment of markets in natural resources (and other things). This does not discount the potential of market mechanisms, but seeks clear recognition of their implications and design of policy regimes in a manner sensitive to this understanding. As proposals for and implementation of water pricing and trading increase, this should be borne in mind.
Urban Australia as we know it grew up with and became accustomed to reliable and abundant supplies of clean, safe water. This is a truly tremendous achievement, and a curse. The achievement is of urban amenity, quality of life, convenience and, above all, public health. The curse is an inflexible, institutionalised water and waste system based on a large-scale, engineered, ‘big pipe in, big pipe out’ logic. This system does not encourage frugality, is hard to refashion given the inertia of infrastructure, and does not readily admit independence of supply or inventive and less environmentally disruptive use of wastewater. Some of the best-quality treated water in the world is used for all applications, from drinking to gardening and flushing toilets, and huge quantities of it are required to shift wastes in low gradient, gravity-driven sewers to bulk treatment plants from whence valuable water and nutrients are ejected into the ocean (or, worse in some cases, rivers).
The organisations and professions that developed and oversee this at once wonderful and regrettable system of water and sanitation are often as resilient as the infrastructure. This is an expectable example of the co-evolution of professional and organisational norms. That appears to be as true of today’s marketised corporations as it was of the statutory authorities from which they arose. In their defence, many of the things that are increasingly being demanded of corporatised water utilities are simply not rational for them to do within the statutory mandate that governments, representing society, have given them. This includes such things as mandating efficiency, undertaking long-term environmental monitoring, collecting water data that informs other than straight commercial accounting needs and investing in different forms of supply and treatment infrastructure.
That applies to individuals as well, hectored to save household water use but subject to instructions and constraints in other dominant areas of policy and technology that weigh against such frugality (see below). Inert and commonplace, the garden hose should be up there with the Victa mower and Hills Hoist as icons of suburban Australia. It symbolises the end point of the bulk-supply reticulated system (the real end point, the hidden sewer, is not an attractive icon): the hose as the serpent of waste in our gardens. The advent of unbelievably cheap black poly pipe and associated efficient drippers has revolutionised water use and efficiency in backyard and on farm, but simply is nowhere as satisfying to use. Or is the real serpent the spa bath? In future, the water tank or dry-composting toilet may become the symbols of urban water behaviour; currently in some rural towns it is a front yard of dust.
The many initiatives to get individuals to change their water behaviours are good and logical, but policy-driven behaviour change as we have noted is not a straightforward matter. Institutional change in a democratic society cannot be too discordant with public values, lived experience and thus supportive normative change. At a practical level, there are issues of how capable and motivated people in houses in Australian cities are when it comes to responding to demands for frugality and effort in managing their personal water consumption.