Resilience, rivers and governance: Learning from experience

How can freshwater systems be governed to cope with the pressures of climate and other ecological change and increasing human demands? What arrangements could better govern coupled eco-social freshwater systems? How might institutional arrangements make these systems more resilient? There are no simple answers to these questions, but there are lessons that can be learnt from experience.

The authors have set out to distil essential lessons about these matters, from a careful review of the history of the implementation of Australia's National Water Initiative, with particular regard to the governance of the country's most economically significant water system, the Murray–Darling basin.