Douglas BARDSLEY, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Georgina DREW, The University of Adelaide, Australia
William SKINNER, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Sophie WINSBOROUGH, The University of Adelaide, Australia
Environmental risk is jeopardising the modern development project (Beck 1992). Agricultural systems are being forced to change dramatically, either directly in response to climate change or indirectly with changing natural resource allocations, socio-economic conditions or policy settings (Bardsley and Knierim 2020). Simultaneously, formal support mechanisms to deal with risk are often limited in scope, so many farming households are increasingly reliant on adjusting their own systems to generate resilience.
Water management experiences in South Australia suggest that approaches that support landholders to achieve outcomes that are environmentally, culturally and socio-economically appropriate for local situations can facilitate effective adaptation (Bardsley et al. 2018). Drawing from experiences of regional water governance policy (Winsborough 2021) and landholders’ adaptation decisions in the Langhorne Creek viticultural region in the lower Murray-Darling Basin (Drew et al., In Review), we outline how diverse hydrosocial approaches enable effective adaptation.
Attention to the ‘hydrosocial’ – the social, cultural and structural relations that tie people and communities together around water use and management – is crucial in understanding the relative efficacy of technological and policy adaptations to climate change. To assist farmers to work through the crisis of the Australian ‘Millennium Drought’, the ‘stick’ of state water resource regulation has been used in conjunction with ‘carrots’ of support for flexible management outcomes. Groundwater, surface and flood waters, and water from both the Lower Lakes and the Murray River are all being used. In doing so, local agro-ecosystems have shifted from a simple, first modernity reliance on a declining groundwater resource, to generate a diversity of opportunities for landowners to use water in sophisticated ways in a manner representative of a reflexive second modernity approach to risk management.
Mots clés : Water|Risk|Adaptation|Agriculture|Australia
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