Aboriginal peoples in Australia have the oldest living cultures in the world. From 1788 the British colonisation of Australia marginalised Aboriginal communities from land and water resources and their traditional rights and interests. More recently, the national water reforms further disenfranchised Aboriginal communities from their property rights in water, continuing to embed severe disadvantage. Overturning aqua nullius aims to cultivate a new understanding of Aboriginal water rights and interests in the context of Aboriginal water concepts and water policy development in Australia. In this award-winning work, Dr Marshall argues that Aboriginal water rights require legal recognition as property rights, and that water access and water infrastructure are integral to successful economic enterprise in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal peoples social, cultural and economic certainty rests on their right to control and manage customary water. Drawing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Marshall argues that the reservation of Aboriginal water rights needs to be prioritised above the water rights and interests of other groups. It is only then that we can sweep away the injustice of aqua nullius and provide the first Australians with full recognition and status of their water rights and interests.

Overturning aqua nullius aims to cultivate a new understanding of Aboriginal water rights and interests in the context of Aboriginal water concepts and water policy development in Australia. In this award-winning work, Dr Marshall argues that Aboriginal water rights require legal recognition as property rights, and that water access and water infrastructure are integral to successful economic enterprise in Aboriginal communities. Aboriginal peoples' social, cultural and economic certainty rests on their right to control and manage customary water. Drawing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Marshall argues that the reservation of Aboriginal water rights needs to be prioritised above the water rights and interests of other groups.

In an era of climate change, the need to manage our water resources effectively for future generations has become an increasingly significant challenge. Indigenous management practices have been successfully used to manage inland water systems around the world for thousands of years, and Indigenous people have been calling for a greater role in the management of water resources. As First Peoples and as holders of important knowledge of sustainable water management practices, they regard themselves as custodians and rights holders, deserving of a meaningful role in decision-making. This book argues that a key (albeit not the only) means of ensuring appropriate participation in decision-making about water management is for such participation to be legislatively mandated. To this end, the book draws on case studies in Australia and New Zealand in order to elaborate the legislative tools necessary to ensure Indigenous participation, consultation and representation in the water management landscape.

This book interrogates the problems of how and why largely unseen matter, in this case groundwater, has found limited expression in climate fiction. It explores key considerations for writing groundwater narratives in the Anthropocene. The book investigates a unique selection of climate fiction alongside an exploration of hydrosocial environmental humanities through a focus on groundwater and groundwater narratives. Providing eco-critical analysis, with creative fiction and non-fiction excerpts interwoven throughout, and drawing on Indigenous Australian and Australian settler novels and poems alongside European, American and Japanese texts, the book illuminates the processes of ‘storying with’ subterranean waters – their facts, uncertainties, potencies and vulnerabilities. In a time when the water crisis in an Australian and worldwide context is escalating in response to global warming, giving voice to the complexities of groundwater extraction and pollution is vital. Drawing from non-representational, posthumanist and feminist perspectives, the book provides an important contribution to transnational, comparative climate fiction analysis, enabling an interdisciplinary exchange between hydrogeological science and the eco-humanities. This book is an engaging read for scholars and students in creative writing, environmental humanities, cultural and post-colonial studies, Australian studies, and eco-critical literary studies. Writers and thinkers addressing the problems of the Anthropocene are called to pay attention to the importance of subterranean imaginaries and groundwater narratives.

In Restorative and Responsive Human Services, Gale Burford, John Braithwaite, and Valerie Braithwaite bring together a distinguished collection providing rich lessons on how regulation in human services can proceed in empowering ways that heal and are respectful of human relationships and legal obligations. The human services are in trouble: combining restorative justice with responsive regulation might redeem them, renewing their well-intended principles. Families provide glue that connects complex systems. What are the challenges in scaling up relational practices that put families and primary groups at the core of health, education, and other social services? This collection has a distinctive focus on the relational complexity of restorative practices. How do they enable more responsive ways of grappling with complexity than hierarchical and prescriptive human services? Lessons from responsive business regulation inform a re-imagining of the human services to advance wellbeing and reduce domination. Readers are challenged to re-examine the perverse incentives and contradictions buried in policies and practices. How do they undermine the capacities of families and communities to solve problems on their own terms? This book will interest those who harbor concerns about the creep of domination into the lives of vulnerable citizens. It will help policymakers and researchers to re-focus human services to fundamental outcomes at the foundation of sustainable democracies.

Scientists have long been searching for a unified field theory--one answer to all of the questions about the physical universe. In this book, Rhett Larson takes a similar approach to social policy questions. What if we could find a unified social policy theory--the answer to every question from how to prevent war to how to promote gender equality? Most of our most serious global challenges are complex, multi-faceted "wicked problems." But perhaps the first step in solving wicked problems as seemingly distinct as racism and disease epidemics is the same: reform our laws, policies, and priorities to achieve global water security. Global water security means reasonable access for all people to water of acceptable quantity and quality with acceptable costs and risks. Just as the essential element to all life is water, so water is the essential element to solving life's challenges. Virtually every major social challenge--including gender inequality, racial discrimination, terrorism, space exploration, global disease epidemics, mass migrations, and climate change--has a significant and underappreciated water component. Each chapter of this book takes up one of these wicked problems, illustrates the role water plays in that problem, and proposes reforms to address the water aspect of that problem, with the aim of achieving global water security. The goal of this this book is to convince the reader that the answer, or at least one part of the answer, to our most serious problems is the oft-repeated catchphrase: "Just add water."

This book identifies the most effective water policy tools and innovations, and the circumstances that foster their successful implementation by taking a comparative look at a world-leading ‘laboratory’ of water law and governance: Australia. In particular, the book analyses Australia’s 20-year experience implementing a hybrid governance system of markets, hierarchical regulation, and collaborative integrated water planning. Australia is acknowledged as a world leader in water governance reform, and an examination of its relatively mature water law and governance system has great significance for many international academics and jurisdictions. This book synthesises practical lessons and theoretical insights from Australia, as well as recommendations from comparative analysis with countries such as the United States to provide useful guidance for policymakers and scholars seeking to apply water instruments in a wide range of policy contexts. The book also advances our understanding of water and broader environmental governance theory and is a valuable reference for scholars, researchers and students working in law, regulation and governance studies – especially in the field of water and environmental law. Chapter “Lessons from Australian water reforms: Indigenous and environmental values in market-based water regulation” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.