Could addressing fairness make some water sharing challenges more achievable?

Water sharing plans, also known as water allocation plans or water management plans are the primary policy instrument used across Australia for allocating water resources across critical and often competing uses.

By their nature, water sharing plans are difficult. They often require challenging and contentious trade-off decisions and as such are plagued by policy deadlocks, which arise when stakeholders, affected by the plans see them as unfair, oppose their implementation.

Numerous examples from across the country point to instances where stakeholder opposition related to their unfairness has been the cause for plans failing.

Public trust in the 2012 Barwon-Darling Water Sharing Plan, which was designed to balance water between towns, irrigators and the environment, collapsed due to stakeholder concerns that the water sharing arrangements were unfair. Since then, revisions of the plan have been plagued by widespread backlash, legal threats and the need for revisions.

The Mataranka Water Allocation Plan in the Northern Territory seeks to set sustainable extraction limits for water drawn from the Tindall Limestone Aquifer. The plan has been strongly opposed by many First Nations custodians, along with environmental advocates, on the grounds that it fails to protect cultural sites and relies insufficiently on on-Country evidence. Despite this opposition, the plan was gazetted in December 2024 and is now in operation, though it continues to face a legal challenge in the Northern Territory Supreme Court that has deepened tensions between the government and Traditional Owner representatives.

It is clear that these policy deadlocks driven by issues of unfairness stymie progress and often leave all parties worse off. With so many examples of stakeholder opposition effecting implementation, the question becomes whether there is some other way. Are there better ways to engage with stakeholders from the outset of a water sharing process?

Watertrust Australia has done extensive work on ways to overcome policy deadlocks through focussing on understanding different stakeholder perceptions of fairness.

Late last year Watertrust carried out workshops to socialise these principles with various stakeholders including South Australia’s Landscape Boards and Department for Environment and Water. This included time spent working with policy makers from across South Australia on where and how Watertrust’s policy work could be applied to real world situations.

Keenly aware of the challenges, the South Australian Government identified the Mount Lofty region as a place in which to apply Watertrust’s work on fairness.

The Mount Lofty region typifies the challenges inherent in water sharing cases across the country. Stretching from the Barossa Valley in the north to the Fleurieu Peninsula and Victor Harbor in the south, demands for the water that flows through the region’s short, steep catchments, and sit below ground are high.

These waters support native fish populations, remnant wetlands and threatened ecological communities such as the Fleurieu Swamps. They are used as drinking water for Adelaide and regional areas across South Australia and support high value agriculture such as viticulture, fruit and vegetables, as well as dairy and grazing, tourism and forestry.

Since 2013, water sharing in the Mount Lofty Ranges has been managed using Water Allocation Plans (WAPs). A review of the Mt Lofty Ranges WAPs in 2024 found that the desired environmental outcomes of the WAPs had not been achieved due to limited implementation programs aimed at achieving them. The situation in the Mount Lofty region mirrors many issues common in sharing and allocation scenarios all around Australia - wicked problems around competing interests and a diminishing resource. It also includes stakeholders who see past decision-making as unfair.

Watertrust’s work on fairness has identified the need to explicitly consider different stakeholder perspectives of fairness when undertaking policy development processes. As part of the work for the Mount Lofty WAP review, Watertrust is currently listening to different stakeholders in the region to hear their views. What we’ve found is that how people frame a problem varies, and is important. It should be used to inform policy development at an early stage. The work underway will be used to support the Hills and Fleurieu Landscape Board design the future process for a revised water sharing plan.

Lessons learnt from this work could help shape water sharing decision making processes around the country, and help to answer the question: How do you share finite and diminishing water resources across different interests in a way that people see as fair?

Want to know more? Call Kane: 0458 976 999.

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