Going with the flow
by Vincent Ciccarello
It didn’t take visiting Fulbright scholar Sara Hughes long to sum
up the taste of Adelaide water.
"It’s gross!" she said.
You’d expect someone born and bred on the shores of Lake Michigan ("we have tons of water") to be less than impressed by the quality of our drinking water. But when it comes to how Australia manages its precious water resources, Hughes couldn’t be more complimentary.
"Australia is pretty advanced in water trading and water markets," she said. "When you read the literature, it still sounds like an emerging concept people are thinking about. Australia already has it in place."
Hughes, a PhD student from the University of California, Santa Barbara, is here until March 2008 to study the social, political and economic debates surrounding water policy in Australia and then compare them with those in the US.
"I’m interested in how we go about securing urban water supplies, the institutional mechanisms for that, and the idea of environmental water allocation," she said. "Also, I’d really like to compare that with the social discourses that are happening – the way it’s talked about in newspapers and in other kinds of public forums. How do people talk about urban water supply – is it about conservation, is it about finding new supplies, is it about equity, is it about how expensive it is?"
Hughes is working alongside the Director of the Centre for Comparative Water Policies and Laws, Professor Jennifer McKay, looking at how this social discourse affects water policy and its implementation.
"I want to do that broadly for the State, and then to look specifically at the Wellington weir debate. The major argument for the weir is to secure the supply for Adelaide, but the loser is environmental flows. I’m really curious about the institutional economics surrounding that decision and also the discourses it has evoked among different groups."
Hughes said there were parallels in northern California where a series of weirs and levees manipulated water in the San Francisco Delta which supplies more than 40 per cent of the state’s water, but was suffering from negative environmental effects.
"They’ve gotten to the point where some fish are endangered and so they’ve implemented an environmental water allocation requirement," she said, adding that water management is not just about dealing with water scarcity.
Her interest in water policy was sparked by a dispute in her home state of Michigan, where the impact of a new bottled water plant on streams and groundwater ended in a bitter court battle.
"Groundwater, in particular, tends not to be very well monitored – how much we have, where it is and who’s using it – it’s sort of the last thing to get regulated," Hughes said.
She refers to other parallels between Australia and the US, citing the similarity between the Colorado River Compact, a 1922 agreement between seven US states to oversee water allocation, and the Murray Darling Basin Commission. And while water will become an important global issue, Hughes believes water sharing agreements like these may serve a bigger geopolitical purpose.
"Projects on sustainable water technologies and the relationship between exporting and importing countries relates to so many other issues," she said. "As people work out how to share water, such as with the Danube or the Nile, which run through a number of countries, it can be a source of peacemaking and negotiation. Water can be a focal point for a lot of different kinds of political, technological and environmental advancements."