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This paper and Special Issue build a case for why justice matters in water governance and why it should be explicitly accounted for in water management and allocation. It describes four characteristics of water and their implications for social and environmental justice. These four characteristics - the spatial and temporal uneven distribution of water; the fact that water is essential for all life, with minimums needed for the survival of both the environment and humankind; water's added benefits to human well-being through the goods and services it provides; and the ensuing political dimensions of power asymmetries affecting water governance - have resulted in a plethora of disciplinary interpretations of justice in an attempt to capture its relevance and importance. The collection of papers in this Special Issue provides a glimpse into the diverse range of issues that can emerge when justice considerations are taken or not taken into account in water governance. Water justice is particularly significant when societal change occurs because of altered allocations, institutional rules of the game or in the underlying hydrological regime. We summarise 10 steps that contribute to the continuing articulation of a 'water justice framework' by researchers interested in this field of research and practice.

Multiculturalism has gradually retreated as a meaningful concept for Australian identity and has, instead, been replaced by principles of equal citizenship and a commitment to the core values of Australian national identity. This paper firstly locates these shifts in broader theoretical debates underpinning democratic governance and equal citizenship. Secondly, and given that local government is a key constituent of Australia's democratic system, the paper seeks to explore the attitudes of local government representatives towards multicultural services and cultural citizenship in contemporary Australia. The empirical findings of this study show that a minority of local government representatives hold a negative outlook on cultural diversity and multicultural policies. The paper argues that it is important to ensure opportunities for intercultural understanding at the local level are optimised as a way of enhancing full and equal citizenship for all and thus creating greater possibilities for successful integration among religious and cultural minorities.

The centrality of regulation among the tools deployed by governments is well established in the social science literature. Regulation of public sector bodies by non-state organizations is an important but neglected aspect of contemporary governance arrangements. Some private regulators derive both authority and power from a legal mandate for their activities. Statutory powers are exercised by private regulators where they are delegated or contracted out. Contractual powers take collective (for example, self-regulatory) and individuated forms. But a further important group of private regulators, operating both nationally and internationally, lack a legal mandate and yet have the capacity to exercise considerable power in constraining governments and public agencies. In a number of cases private regulators operate more complete regulatory regimes (in the sense of controlling standard setting, monitoring, and enforcement elements) than is true of public regulators. While private regulators may enhance the scrutiny given to public bodies (and thus enhance regimes of control and accountability), their existence suggests a need to identify the conditions under which such private power is legitimately held and used. One such condition is the existence of appropriate mechanisms for controlling or checking power. Such controls may take the classic form of public oversight, but may equally be identified in the checks exercised by participation in communities or markets.