Non-Market Valuation and Resilient Decision-Making for Water Justice

Why are First People’s social and cultural water values ignored in policy-making?

Professor Quentin Grafton from the Crawford School of Public Policy leads an interdisciplinary team pioneering methods to estimate First Peoples’ socio-cultural water values. The project team draws on expertise across the IWF and the ANU, including: Katherine Daniell, Long Chu, Virgina Marshall, Ana Ruiz, Kat Taylor, John Williams, and Paul Wyrwoll. Other members of the project team include Anne Poelina (Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council) and international experts in non-market valuation (Victor Adamowicz) and natural resources law and governance (William Nikolakis). Funding is provided through an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship and the Hilda John Endowment Fund.

Market values, marginal values, and measurable costs and benefits are the currency of water planning and decision-making. Water values that are not easily quantified are often ignored or treated as an inconvenient constraint on allocating more water to ‘productive uses’, such as irrigation and mining. The project addresses this challenge amidst the ongoing failure of Australia’s water governance systems to recognise its First Peoples’ rights to water. It is developing pioneering methods to estimate the marginal values from incremental changes to different attributes of First Peoples’ water in the Martuwarra Fitzroy (Western Australia) and Northern Murray Darling (New South Wales). These water values will be integrated into decision-making processes using resilience- and risk-based tools. This project is important to a range of beneficiaries and stakeholders, including Indigenous communities, policy-makers, and water justice researchers.

The overall aim is to value water and support resilient decision-making for water justice. Its significance is to provide missing socio-cultural-environmental values of First Peoples water, the absence of which means Indigenous demands for water justice are frequently ignored. Project outcomes will empower First Peoples and support resilient and evidence-based decision-making. The key benefit is a more sustainable Australia through: first-ever conjoint socio-cultural values of First Peoples’ water; transformative decision-making to account for Indigenous values and risks (such as droughts); and a Water Justice Hub that creates a generation of scholars in integrated water valuation, resilient decision-making, and Traditional Water Knowledge.

Relevant links:

Water Justice Hub: https://waterjusticehub.org/