Beyond the Allocation: Community Voices on Water, Adaptation, and Shared Futures in Leeton, NSW

Adrine Santos is a One Basin CRC scholarship recipient and MPhil candidate at the University of Sydney’s Sydney School of Education & Social Work, researching how people in irrigation-dependent communities understand and relate to water in their everyday lives. Her project, “Beyond the Allocation: Community Voices on Water, Adaptation & Shared Futures in Leeton, NSW,” uses Leeton the birthplace of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area in regional NSW as a case study to explore the social, cultural, and relational dimensions of water that rarely feature in Basin-wide decision-making, and how community knowledge might support adaptation to a future of growing water uncertainty across the Murray-Darling Basin.

About this project

Despite decades of water research across the Murray-Darling Basin, relatively little attention has been given to how the people who live and work in irrigation-dependent communities actually relate to water in their everyday lives. Technical, governance, and policy frameworks have tended to dominate the field, while the social, cultural, and relational dimensions of water , the stories people tell, the meanings they attach to it, and the knowledge built from years of living alongside it remain largely unexplored. Working in partnership with the One Basin CRC and the University of Sydney, this project seeks to better understand that dimension of Basin life. 

The research will explore Leeton, NSW, a town built on and around the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area and home to one of the most culturally diverse communities in regional Australia. Rather than focusing on formal water governance or policy processes, it will seek to understand the lived experience of community members: long-term farming families, culturally and linguistically diverse residents, seasonal workers, and others whose daily lives are shaped by water but whose perspectives are not always visible in Basin-wide conversations. How different community members experience, express, and make meaning of water in daily life is an open and genuinely curious question that this research hopes to shed light on. 

The research will be conducted using Participatory Action Research (PAR), informed by community development principles. Rather than arriving with predetermined methods, the approach involves building relationships and co-designing the research process with community members reflecting a commitment to working alongside communities and remaining open to what emerges through genuine engagement. 

Expected Outcomes

This project is currently in its early phase, with community engagement in Leeton underway. While it is early days, the research hopes to generate new insights into how diverse irrigation communities relate to water beyond governance frameworks, contribute to participatory research methodology in regional Australian contexts, and support community-owned reflection on water adaptation and shared futures in Leeton. It is anticipated that whatever is discovered will have relevance beyond Leeton, potentially informing how the One Basin CRC and its partners think about community knowledge and voice across comparable Basin communities.