Water allocation in Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin: Managing change under heightened uncertainty

Thilak Mallawaarachchi, Christopher Auricht, Adam Loch, David Adamson and John Quiggin

Economic Analysis and Policy, 2020, vol. 66, issue C, 345-369

Abstract: Historically, water resource policy in the Murray–Darling Basin (Basin) has taken a pro-farmer orientation leaving the environment to become the residual claimant. Around 1990, the attention was focused on minimisingoveruse that led to on-farm productivity losses and developing a market for water to help define opportunity costs of water in irrigation. More recently, the scope has been extended to include explicit allocations for the environment. However, the failure to agree on policies for recovering water for the environment in the implementation of the Basin Plan has extended avenues for rent seeking and cost shifting, thereby raising the total costs of reform. A focus on water use per se, rather than system productivity, and sidelining of market-based approaches in preference for government investment in water recovery and water use efficiency has complicated risk assignment amongst different users. Recurring droughts and resultant scarcity of water has made negotiations further complicated and controversial, broadening the gulf between environmentalists seeking public good outcomes and irrigators seeking private profit.

Keywords: Water management; Irrigation; Social cost; Risk and uncertainty; Public policy; Adaptation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0313592619304096
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecanpo:v:66:y:2020:i:c:p:345-369

DOI: 10.1016/j.eap.2020.01.001

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Analysis and Policy is currently edited by Clevo Wilson

More articles in Economic Analysis and Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().