Gareth Edwards, BA (Hons)

PhD Candidate

Madsen Building (F09), Room 420
Phone: +61 2 9351 7669
Fax: +61 2 9351 3644
Email:

Supervisor
Dr Phil McManus

Research

Working Title: The construction, experience and management of water scarcity in NSW and its implications for social equity and environmental sustainability

Water and its management is one of the key environmental issues facing humanity in the 21st century. This was recognised in 1992 at the International Conference on Water and the Environment in Dublin with the so-called 'Dublin Statement' and commended by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio the same year in 'Agenda 21'. Since then, water has only risen in importance. Water scarcity has become more acute because of the growing world population, increasing standards of living and projections of a future influenced by human-induced climate change.

In this context of scarcity, commentators have debated the possibility of and likely nature of conflict over water in the past, present and particularly, the future. While a causal link between water scarcity and violent conflict has been difficult to establish, consensus has emerged that water scarcity and its governance and management often result in or aggravate structural disadvantage and may lead to social disturbance. The geometries of power (economic, social and political) impact on both the conceptualisation of the water scarcity problem and its management.

Around the world, neoliberal forms of environmental governance have become dominant in the last 15 years. Much more than simply an economic doctrine, the various forms of neoliberalism have revolutionised the way humans view nature and manage it. But processes such as commodification/marketization and privatization have been met with considerable disquiet, both from the general public and the critical academy. At the same time, a concurrent literature considering environmental justice and the cognate social psychology literature considering conceptualizations of ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ has led to some debate as to whether concepts such as ‘equity’ provide pathways to imagine and work towards more socially just and environmentally sustainable futures.

This research attempts to interrogate the critique of nature’s neoliberalization with notions of equity, and likewise to apply the critiques prevalent in the neoliberalization literature to equity and justice, in the hope of better understanding how our conceptualization of water scarcity influences the approach we adopt to cope with it. It considers how lessons and approaches from both literatures can be marshalled to achieve more just and sustainable approaches to dealing with water scarcity.

The physical focus of the research is NSW, Australia. Two areas in NSW – one large city (Sydney) and one rural town (Goulburn) and their rural hinterlands are its primary study sites. It takes the different water scarcity experiences of urban and rural areas as a starting point from which to investigate how the construction, management and experience of water scarcity are intertwined in both rural and urban areas, and the possibilities and pitfalls of both current and emerging approaches to managing water scarcity.

Temporally, it draws on the past to inform the future. The Australian Government is currently driving the implementation of the largest water reform program the country has ever seen, at a time when drought has been a persistent feature of the social, economic, political and environmental landscape of large parts of eastern Australia for some 5 years. A critical reflection on this is timely.

It deliberately holds a dual focus on the urban and the rural, because not only are both affected in significantly different ways by water scarcity and water governance, but both are necessarily dependent on the actions of the other. Furthermore, the consistently urbanizing nature of the world population means that new approaches to dealing with resource issues between them are urgently required. The old rural-urban divide in thinking, policy-making and administration is no longer appropriate.