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Water is indispensable to our life, our economy, our food security and our environment. Ensuring its protection and sustainable use requires effective and efficient law and policy. Over the last 120 years, our water laws have been on a prolonged reform journey. Spurred by Australia's water-scarce environment and ongoing overallocation challenges, Australia's water law system has progressed from common law rights, to state regulation, to intergovernmental action under the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) led National Competition Policy reforms and the National Water Initiative (NWI). The latter agreement, which embraced statutory-based collaborative water planning, cap and trade markets, regulation and accounting, monitoring and review, has demarcated Australia as a leading laboratory of water governance. Even so, after such a long reform journey, fatigue and apathy are increasingly palpable in water policy. Notwithstanding recent emphasis on northern water resource development, this equivocation about continued national reforms is jeopardising Australia's long-term water sustainability. This chapter argues that entrenching and extending national reforms is vital to Australia's future water security. It argues for four key broad reforms. The context and justification for each reform is given by briefly evaluating the performance of NWI planning, markets, regulation and monitoring. The discussion focuses particularly on non-urban water management. This is because agriculture is the largest consumer of Australia's water, making it the area where some of the biggest gains can be made in securing sustainable water management.

This chapter charts Australia's leading-edge water law and governancereforms. It discusses progress on implementation and the challenges this has posed. Connections are drawn between Australia's experience and the water law and governance literature. After outlining the book's chapters, four fundamental questions are analysed and answered, namely how successful is Australia's approach to designing and implementing water governance? What conditions have enabled or blocked its success, including environment, social, political and legal? How does Australia's water governance system compare and contrast with different international water governance practices? And what are the broader insights for future water governance practice and theory?

All regulators must confront the question as to how best to achieve compliance and enforcement within their resource constraints. This challenge comprises four issues, namely the where, how, who and why of regulatory enforcement. First is where to allocate regulatory resources? In most circumstances, agencies will not be able to inspect and target all regulated firms or sites due to limited resources. As such, regulators inevitably have to make a choice between potential inspection targets, and about the frequency and length of inspections. The second question confronting regulators is how to intervene in the affairs of regulated firms in instances of non-compliance? This encompasses both the range and nature of enforcement tools available to inspectors, and the way in whichthose tools are employed (or not) individually, in combination or sequentially. It is the interplay of the available tools and their application that determine an agency's regulatory enforcement strategy. Two subsidiary issues are who should intervene (government or other parties beyond government regulators that are willing and able to assume a surrogate enforcement role) and why they should intervene (eg is the enforcement action rationale for education, retribution or deterrence purposes). This chapter explores the where, how, who and why of five key regulatory enforcement strategies. It also highlightshow context influences the application of these strategies, particularly relating to inspection, targeting and escalation.

This chapter critically examines the new environmental governance, a novel innovation in legal thinking and practice that offers a pathway for operationalizing resilience. New governance relies heavily upon participatory dialogue and deliberation, flexibility, inclusiveness, multi-level and integrated approaches, knowledge generation and processes of learning and adaptation. These features enable new governance to addresses many of the critical challenges demanded by resilience theory, because it explicitly seeks to allow different scopes of risk to be managed at different levels and engages a larger number of actors to facilitate experimentation and learning in the face of uncertainty. This chapter highlights the contours of the new environmental governance, its growth as a new form of legal jurisprudence, its relationship to broader resilience thinking and its position as an approach that can administer and operationalise resilience. The advantages of new governance and its limits for adaptively managing change in social and ecological systems are examined in detail. The analysis reveals that although new governance holds significant promise, it has often struggled to fulfil its adaptive and flexible aspirations and overcome barriers of unequal power and resources. It concludes by setting out emerging issues for understanding and reforming new environmental governance and its approach to managing resilience.

After 20 years of water reform in Australia, the clear policy "winner" has been the cap and trade market-based instrument. Although widely promoted as an efficient tool for managing water, little critical attention has been directed to the legal and governance issues of water markets, including matters such as compliance and enforcement, water accounting, and the overall effectiveness of water trading. In response to these gaps, this article critically evaluates Australia's cap and trade instrument, drawing on a review of the literature and new survey and interview data collected in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland from government and non-government stakeholders. The findings reveal achievements, including: flexible responses to past and future droughts; efficiencies that contribute to economic and environmental benefits; and increasing trade and market functionality. Yet, the results also suggest cap and trade schemes are not functioning at the peak of their powers because of seven key flaws, namely: a lack of robust regulatory underpinning; limited accuracy in water accounting; challenges in addressing universality of impact and source; queries over environmental benefits; lack of accounting for wider social impacts; windfall gains; and limited operation across Australia. Some of these flaws are correctable, and the article pinpoints relevant areas for market policy reform. However, a number of the identified flaws require water law and policy to look beyond markets. The article argues that, in these areas, such as groundwater, complementary regulatory tools are needed to ensure Australia's future water security and sustainability.

The NSW Office of Water (NOW) is responsible for the regulation of water extraction under the Water Act 1912 (NSW) and the Water Management Act 2000 (NSW). However, little is known about how water users have responded to regulation, including their knowledge, perceptions and experiences of the success or otherwise of these regulatory endeavours, and their own role in complying with legislative obligations. Nor is the role of communication and education in encouraging and facilitating voluntary compliance well understood. With the commencement of the National Framework for Compliance and Enforcement Systems in Water Resource Management in 2011 (which aims to provide a nationally consistent approach to better compliance and enforcement capabilities), it is timely to gauge water users' views and experiences to better inform future policy developments. The research study outlined in this report explores four central themes concerning water users: •Motivations for complying with legal obligations. •Views and experiences with NOW's compliance and enforcement policies and practices.•Sources of information and the perceived usefulness of information. •Knowledge of water regulations and resources used to assist with compliance.The purpose of the study is to identify opportunities for more efficient and effective regulation of water extraction in NSW.

This chapter explores the case study of the Lower Murrumbidgee Groundwater Management Area in New South Wales, Australia. In particular, it illustrates the contours of two policy approaches for water entitlement reduction: one was a failure (unilateral reductions imposed uniformly on all water users); and one was a success (financial compensation for cutbacks in entitlements, negotiated in the shadow of court action). The long-standing problem of over-allocation in the Lower Murrumbidgee was addressed initially through a process of entitlement reduction, driven by the government and involving a heated and contested policy approach. The primary method of reduction was an approximate 50% cut to all entitlements (regardless of capital commitments). This was challenged by a group of groundwater irrigators in the Land and Environment Court, who preferred to regulate pumping by managing the water level within a sustainable bandwidth. Although the case was unsuccessful, the judge raised concerns about the fairness of the new arrangements, and the irrigators planned an appeal. The litigation and threat of an appeal proved a catalyst for cooperation amongst groundwater users across the state, producing a policy shift that saw the government pursue a program known as Achieving Sustainable Groundwater Entitlements. This program recognised historical extraction in calculating entitlement reduction, and provided financial assistance to licence holders. Overall, this case study illustrates important lessons for policy approaches for reducing entitlements, not least the need to account for local knowledge and concerns, as well as providing adjustment mechanisms (e.g. economic compensation) to ensure the long-term sustainable management of groundwater.

This article explores past and future shifts in policing and criminology scholarship that have shaped, and have been shaped by, what is done to enhance safety within political domains. Investigating established policing conceptualizations, it demonstrates how the ideal of state delivered safety as a public good was challenged by a sizeable policing industry, giving rise to debates about their legal context, service provision and conceptualizations of policing and security nodal arrangements. The article argues that these understandings are now confronted by new harmscapes and interrelated changes in our conceptualization of social institutional affairs. Interrogating these claims through an examination of two new harmscapes - the Anthropocene and technologies of cyberspace– it canvasses debates and shows that a shared focus of attention for the future of policing will be a decentralization of security and an expansion of private security governance professionals (both human and non-human).

With considerable government, citizen and financial donor attention devoted to a range of international, transnational and domestic laws and policies aimed at protecting, managing and sustainably using fresh and coastal marine water .

This concluding chapter compares the important features of the groundwater policy and management approaches that have been implemented in France and Australia and draws lessons that may be relevant to other countries who are implementing groundwater management regimes. To support the comparison, the chapter looks at six main stages of the policy development process: (1) political awareness raising; (2) increasing the groundwater knowledge base; (3) defining and allocating water use rights; (4) defining sustainability objectives and setting extraction limits; (5) returning over-allocated and overused ground-water systems to sustainable levels of extraction; and (6) enforcement policies.

The Anthropocene is an era in which humans have become the primary driver of planetary systems, not least the global hydrological cycle. This is posing significant challenges for managing the globe's water resources, and is catalyzing a shift in the focus of water law, governance and policy research. One important feature of this shift is a burgeoning focus on groundwater resources and their exploitation, particularly in developing countries. As surface water succumbs to climate pressures, groundwater use has increased rapidly as a source of food production and economic development. A fundamental question for modern water law and governance research is: what are the key challenges and opportunities for effective design and implementation of groundwater law to achieve sus-tainable and inclusive development. This article provides insights into this question through an empirical examination of Costa Rica. Drawing on an empirical analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with public andprivate stakeholders in Costa Rica, the findings identify the following challenges and opportunities for ground-water governance: (i) recognition of water as a public good and clear ownership; (ii) insufficient definition of groundwater and embedding within the concepts of sustainable and inclusive development and participation; (iii) inadequate organization and toolbox, including implementation.

This chapter focuses on the interaction between conjunctive management and collective action.Collective action has several characteristics that provide a natural 'fit' with conjunctive management. These include building trust and ownership to enhance water user's acceptance of the need for better and more integrated management and resolving conflict and facilitating trade-offs between and across water users. But what are the opportunities and challenges for conjunctive management through collective action? And what types of settings encourage broadbased collective action by water users and governments? These questions are addressed through a comparative analysis of specific instances of groundwater governance in Australia, Spain, and thewesternUnited States ofAmerica. For each case, the diverse policy and institutional settings are explained, and consideration given to the motivators for, and successes of, conjunctive management and collectiveaction. The chapter draws comparisons across the cases to suggest lessons on incentives for conjunctive management, as well as exploring its challenges, before identifying future directions for more effective integrated water management.

Groundwater depletion is arguably one of humanity's greatest sustainability challenges of the 21st century. WithSustainable Development Goals only a decade away, water authorities around the world are in the urgent need forconcrete and targeted measures to ensure that communities adhere to groundwater management policies as rapidlyand as effectively as possible. In this paper, we combine computational social science, groundwater modelling andempirical data from the World Values Survey to generate future ensembles of hydro-social trajectories underalternative courses of management and social action or inaction. Our simulations shed new light on the role thatcultural values can play in shaping the societal trajectories and norms that emerge when resources are either allocatedor not sufficiently allocated to monitor compliance, issue fines, engage community leaders, and deter rule-breakers.This study presents a new approach to explore and evaluate the capacity of existing and future management actionsto steer groundwater systems towards sustainable trajectories, to forecast the celerity and timing of socialtransformations at the inter-decadal scale, and to help nations identify the most pertinent management options underinstitutional, political, social, and/or cultural constraints. The methods presented here are broadly applicable to supportstrategic decisions that rely on the monitoring, enforcement, and compliance of environmental regulations.

After 2 decades of cooperative governmental reforms on water, Australia established a world-leading hybrid governance system involving top-down regulation, water markets and water planning with stakeholder cooperation. Yet, with the abolition of the National Water Commission (NWC) in 2015,1 there is a growing belief that Australia may have "dropped the ball on water". At this critical juncture, it is both significant and timely to examine the challenges and future direction of Australia's water reforms. In light of these concerns, in December 2015, the Faculty of Law and the Connected Waters Initiative Research Centre at UNSW Australia hosted a group of water law specialists to consider the key successes and limits of Australia's hybrid water governance system, as well as to explore how best to steer water governance towards a more sustainable future path. At the conclusion of the workshop, it was apparent that although Australia has come a long way in water management under the NWI, the design and implementation of this national reform does not appear sufficient to meet future water challenges. Further reforms and changes will be required and this article sets out 10 priorities that should be considered and addressed by governments, civil society and industries if we are to achieve a sustainable water future for Australia.