The food-bowl modernisation example indicates that the process of legal and regulatory change in water resources is more diffuse than a simple imposition of ‘market systems’ to displace the existing elements of the state-based ‘resource development’ model (Bakker 2005: 546). Urban water-law reform in Australia is a regulatory sphere where many elements of state-based property, private property and market-efficiency models coexist. Further, the concepts, assumptions and terminology of resource economics and competition theory have been mediated through malleable definitions of the ‘public interest’ and competing definitions of water ‘property’ rights. Clearly, as the Victorian situation illustrates, these remain open-ended and responsive to further redefinition as the implementation of water-law reform proceeds. In the context of increased pressure for governments to respond to pressures of climate change and water security, it is critical that there be enhanced avenues for informed third-party comment and greater social debate about these questions of the public interest in water-resource development. Social science perspectives provide one such means of capturing a broader understanding of the social and cultural values of water that often seem to be either excluded or ‘discounted’ in the prevailing modes of analysis that inform urban water-supply planning and management. Law, as part of that wider perspective, can play a crucial role in shaping and implementing these normative perspectives.

In turn, adoption of such normative objectives will require associated statutory, institutional and regulatory adjustments, some of which may well entail potential readjustments of underpinning property constructs. The ongoing redefinition of what constitutes property in water as a state-based or private-law entity is inherent to reshaping the purposes of water regulation, the forms of governance and techniques of implementation within an overarching narrative of a move toward greater market ordering. Again there is a need for enhanced transparency about the assumptions upon which such decision-making proceeds rather than an implicit ‘trust’ in technological and market-based approaches. Indeed, policy solutions that are being proposed to remedy the water-security problem in urban areas are functionally constructed in prevailing analyses as market responses. Yet these ‘market responses’ still require explicit deployment of public supply-side ‘technological’ solutions (and legal and institutional support) to institute those efficiencies. Amalgamation of technological supply-side solutions with allocation/entitlement-oriented regimes is seductive. These approaches suggest the input of the public interest via consumer preference and individual-use values, while masking the extent to which demand-side options are displaced by supply-side security ‘solutions’.

In conclusion, even if urban water governance is to be progressively moved within a private-property, market-based model, the hand of government in the market — provided it is much more transparent and not invisible — may well be appropriate to provide a counterpoint to the narrowness of private transactional formulations of property and efficiency that ignore third-party effects and environmental and social externalities. Third-party effects may be felt more acutely in non-urban contexts, even though the focus may be urban water provision. As Arnold (2005: 4) notes: ‘[J]ust because property is private, rather than public, does not mean that it is not subject to public controls and interest.’ Alternatively, though, hybrid models of public/private regulation also need to transcend the accretion of earlier state-based technology-driven approaches in favour of more fine-grained regulatory forms that can include more complex understanding of the value of water in a long-term intergenerational sense, as well as appropriate and effective costing of externalities to address long-term water and environmental security.