What is the transformative potential of conflict in navigating issues of water justice in the Murray-Darling Basin?

This project seeks to examine divergent perspectives in governance of sites within the Murray-Darling Basin, and how these are navigated to build just outcomes for local communities.

About this project

This work will be approached with the idea that in the navigation of contested spaces, there is opportunity for challenging historically produced knowledges and power dynamics; to then observe whether this is an opportunity being realised in models of governance employed at the local level. If not, why not? And if so, how?

Drawing on social sciences, the project understands knowledge as being produced through social processes and relationships which are shaped by economic, political and cultural power asymmetries. So, through interaction with and observation of a local community project, seeks to observe how it is that different knowledges / perspectives are communicated, negotiated and integrated into collective action in community.

This project is committed to using methods of inquiry that avoid extraction and instead position participants as collaborators and co-researchers, and so it is natural that this project adopts a participatory action research approach. This will involve working with one or two existing community projects within the Basin to simultaneously contribute to the community project whilst drawing learnings from the interactions that occur within and throughout the life of the project.

Outcomes

Through interaction with specific community projects and by using an action research approach, the research will contribute to existing scholarship on collective action in communities, whilst supporting the community projects that form part of the research to move forward in their mission.