The Murray-Darling Basin Game – A model to explore water allocation decisions

Abstract

The Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) is a very complex socio-ecological system, with a multitude of stakeholders, industries, climates, infrastructure developments, and ecosystems. Human occupation spans back millennia, but within the last two centuries there have been massive changes brought about by a succession of government, community and business actions that have reshaped the environment. It is in such an environment that policy and decision-makers find themselves, in their view, having to plan interventions in a complex and uncertain situation, being unable to foresee the emergent characteristics of their actions. One proposed way forward in improving aspects of the MDB situation is to create the conditions for social learning among stakeholders in order to achieve changes in understanding that lead to changes in practices. Social learning can be thought of as a process of building mutual understanding and concerted action among stakeholders towards an improved situation. Effective facilitation, or mediation, is an important component of this, and we propose that a stakeholder-constructed game-based modeling platform can act as a mediating object for exploring the outcomes and emergent consequences of water use and management decisions. We have embarked on an action research project to construct a game-based modeling platform, developed in collaboration with the University of Virginia's UVa Bay Game team, to explore some of the social-technical dynamics of water allocation in the MDB. The Goulburn-Broken Catchment (GBC), in northern Victoria, has been chosen to scope the concept. There are three main research objectives: (1) to construct a robust gamebased modeling platform in the context of the MDB; (2) to engage with a diverse range of stakeholders to decide on key components of the MDB situation to represent in the modeling platform; and (3) to foster reflexivity about the process of model development, game-play and their potential to support practice change among the research team, collaborators and MDB stakeholders. Firstly, in the UVa game, the overall objectives were condensed to measurable environmental and economic outcomes where land-based players (farmers, land developers, and their associated regulators) took decisions that influenced the amount of nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) entering the aquatic system and waterbased players (fishers and regulators). In the MDB, an essential issue of concern to government, consumptive water users and the environment is how to allocate water between different uses. At the macro level, these are consumptive use by people in its various forms and the 'natural' environment. To-date, the MDB Game consists of a conceptual stocks-and-flows model to keep track of the physical aspects of water, the financial outcomes or stocks of money, and ecosystem outcomes or stocks of natural capital. The flows in the model represent transformations of, for example, irrigation water into a crop and subsequent income or a financial transaction related to water trading activity between consumptive users. The players interface with the model by making management decisions related to their role. Currently there are 5 government authority players, 6 types of consumptive use players and 2 guardian players. Historical or simulated weather and hydrology will be used to drive the underlying processes. Secondly, we have begun engaging with environmental water managers from the regional level, policymakers and practitioners from the state level, and are planning a workshop hosted by the federal agency tasked with developing a MDB-wide water management plan. This has already led to a shared understanding of the complex dynamics associated with environmental water allocations across these levels of water governance. Finally, the process of contextualizing a game-based modeling platform designed for a different socio-ecological system has inspired reflexive thought about how the MDB situation is framed.