A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a strategy for river health
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Date
2017-06
Authors
Hemming, Steven John
Rigney, Daryle Matthew
Muller, Samantha L
Rigney, Grant
Campbell, Isobelle
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Ecology and Society
Rights
Copyright © 2017 by the author(s).
Rights Holder
the author(s).
Abstract
Indigenous involvement in Australian water management is conventionally driven by a top-down approach by nonIndigenous government agencies, that asks “how do we engage Indigenous people?” and has culminated in the ineffective “consult” and “service delivery” processes evident in mainstream water management planning. This is a hopeful paper that identifies the critical importance of a “nation-based” approach for effective Indigenous engagement in water planning and policy through the work undertaken by the Ngarrindjeri Regional Authority (NRA) in the Murray Futures program. The NRA is an Indigenous government in the “settled-south” of Australia. Over past decades, the NRA has developed a range of political technologies that act as tools for redeveloping Ngarrindjeri Nationhood after colonial disempowerment and dispossession. These tools enable better collaboration with nonIndigenous governments, especially in natural resource management policy and practice. In turn, this has better enabled the NRA to exercise a decision-making and planning authority over the lands and waters in its jurisdiction, therefore, more effectively exercising its ongoing duty of care as Country. This paper presents a case study of the Sugar Shack Complex Management Plan, codeveloped by the NRA and the South Australian Government in 2015, to demonstrate the benefits that accrue when Indigenous nations are resourced as authorities responsible for reframing water management and planning approaches to facilitate the equitable collaboration of Indigenous and nonIndigenous worldviews. As a marker of the success of this strategy, the Ngarrindjeri Yarluwar-Ruwe Program, in partnership with the South Australian government, recently won the Australian Riverprize 2015 for delivering excellence in Australian river management.
Description
This article is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. You may share and adapt the work for noncommercial purposes provided the original author and source are credited, you indicate whether any changes were made, and you include a link to the license.
Keywords
Decolonizing, Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous nation building, nation-based engagement, natural resource management, self-determination, water management, wetland planning
Citation
Hemming, S., D. Rigney, S. L. Muller, G. Rigney, and I. Campbell. 2017. A new direction for water management? Indigenous nation building as a strategy for river health. Ecology and Society 22(2):13.