Participative Water Resource Allocation and Decision-making in Australia

Current decision-making practices used to determine water allocations between competing uses in Australia generally disregard the social, cultural and political impacts of these types of decisions and to a lesser extent the economics. Tokenistic community consultation, rather than meaningful and purposeful participation in the water allocation decision-making process, results in a lack of community ownership of the final outcomes which creates a difficult environment for the implementation of management recommendations. Active and meaningful participation by the public in decision-making is therefore endorsed here. This paper discusses the issue of public participation in water allocation decision-making in Australia. Major international and national resource policy documents are reviewed in terms of their relative contribution to the participative frameworks applied by Australian decision-making authorities. These participative frameworks often take the form of ‘consultation’, which is generally received by stakeholders as a tokenistic exercise rather than a genuine attempt by government to institute meaningful and purposeful participation in decision-making. A case study consultative process is examined to illustrate the current state of participative decision-making in terms of its location on a continuum of participation and the implications of this for the types of outcomes that are achieved. Current decision-making theory and practice is investigated to provide a compelling case for moving from ‘consultation’ style participation to ‘partnership’, which promotes ‘learning’, affords stakeholders greater power in the decision-making arena and therefore creates ownership of the outcomes. It is advocated here that the implementation of an intentionally participative process which combines the traditionally used scientific and economic details with the often disregarded social, cultural and political components to achieve an overall genuinely holistic approach to resource allocation and decision-making.