Who Owns the River? The Case for Systemic Stewardship.

In Brief

• A river can be managed on paper while dying in practice.

• The Murray-Darling Basin meets its compliance targets while the living system accumulates damage and this not necessarily because data is missing but because standard governance practice uses a one-axis materiality test on a three-axis problem.

• This essay traces how administrative maps replace living territory, introduces coupling and temporal materiality as the missing dimensions and shows what Integrated Decision-Making looks like when applied to water governance.

• The Aboriginal Waterways Assessment provides a working model.

• The practical path runs from naming the decision gate to embedding signals, owners and evidence trails into governance cadence.

The following explores how a river can be managed on paper while dying in real life.

Institutions are built to coordinate at scale but when metrics become more real than reality, decisions can start to drift from the terrain they are trying to manage.

We’re faithful to maps that can’t see the living systems we depend on.

This essay opens The Immersive State, a series exploring the gap between institutional maps and the living systems they claim to govern. The argument is simple. Messy system signals can be made governance-ready, but only if they arrive with clear context, credible options and a traceable evidence trail. Metrics are not neutral and can shape behaviour. What gets measured and rewarded will change what people do, which means that signal integrity has to be designed in and cannot be an afterthought.

In the driest inhabited continent on Earth, we operate as if water were governed by a kind of Aqua Nullius logic. Just as Terra Nullius (land belonging to no one) erased Indigenous sovereignty over land, Aqua Nullius erases the living context of water (Marshall, 2017), reducing it to a passive resource owned by the Crown until allocated to a user for some 'productive' utility.

Once you accept this fiction, a particular kind of governance becomes easy. The river becomes a flow of resources with recognisable attributes like a set of tradeable rights, gigalitre allocation volumes and compliance thresholds. The truth of the system then becomes whatever can be quantified and fits into a spreadsheet. This is the map of the administrative river.

The problem is rarely a shortage of data. What's missing is integration. Integrated decision-making (IDM) combines system condition and integrity, risk exposure and cultural legitimacy into the decisions government actually makes. Allocations, operating rules, approvals, investments. Without that integration, each dimension gets assessed in its own silo and the compound picture never reaches the decision-maker at the cadence the decision requires.

To the policymaker, the critique of Aqua Nullius may feel like a provocation or an open attack on the very stability of property rights that underpin regional economies. Yet the greater threat to that stability is not a shift in legal philosophy, but the emerging reality of 'sub-prime water.' When the river is managed through an administrative construct that treats 'low-security' entitlements as reliable assets based on historical rainfall averages, this is effectively engaging in a form of ecological over-leveraging (Moore et al., 2020).

In a non-stationary climate, these rights are increasingly 'paper water'. They are hollow claims to a resource which no longer physically exists. Moving toward stewardship is not an abandonment of property rights but the implementation of a framework for hydrological solvency. This is really the only way to protect regional investment from a slow-motion sovereign default on living systems, which will ultimately reverberate as financial signals throughout the catchment.

An empirical signal that the water governance map is drifting from the territory is the Menindee fish kills. This was a graphic and distressing example of what happens when allocations are “balanced” while system function collapses.

In the summer of 2018–2019, millions of fish died in the Lower Darling (Baaka) near Menindee (Australian Academy of Science, 2019). The system didn't lack data and the water accounts could be technically ‘balanced’. The failure was that governance had been optimised for extraction and siloed efficiency, while the river was tipping into compound conditions that core management processes were not built to recognise or act on, missing out on key indicators like low flows, increased heat penetration, intensified stratification and collapsing oxygen saturation points.

The map said the river was being managed. The territory said it was breaking apart. That wasn’t a ‘data problem’ but a decision-integration failure. Allocations were treated as compliant on paper even as the physical system was becoming unable to deliver what those provisions were composed of.

To understand the risk in terms institutions already use, the Menindee fish kills read like a default event. Legally secure entitlements were becoming physically unreliable assets that look sound in an administrative ledger but are effectively stranded in the real world. As the gap between administrative maps and living territory widens, it stops being an isolated ecological crisis and becomes a governance and fiduciary exposure. If the state keeps allocating water the system cannot provide, it isn’t just ‘managing drought’ but loading systemic risk onto the public balance sheet.

Regardless of the chosen analogy, there are measurable issues around the reliability of flows, thresholds in water quality and the cumulative erosion of system integrity and capacity.

For government professionals, this creates a wicked dilemma. If you manage the file perfectly but the system fails, who owns the outcome?

The anxiety for the bureaucrat lies in accountability. To move from quantifiable silos toward 'systems thinking,' makes sense theoretically but then how is performance measured for the Auditor-General? The answer lies in moving the yardstick from 'compliance to the file' to 'resilience of the system.' Traditional accountability failed in Menindee because it could not track 'compound risks' related to the simultaneous convergence of heat, low flow, and stratification. Systemic stewardship introduces more granular, real-time metrics. It requires the state to function as a 'Metagovernor,' coordinating the horizontal links between environmental health and economic viability, ensuring that the accounts are balanced not just on a spreadsheet, but in the territory itself.

The Wicked Problem of Inertia

Most public servants aren't indifferent but they can often feel trapped. They are stuck in perpetual business-as-usual (BAU) and unable to escape from a state of governance designed for a stable world that no longer exists.

Inertia in water governance isn't just about moving slowly but more to do with structural blindness. Water is measured and ‘managed’ in one department, land in another and Indigenous culture in a third. This fragmentation is a form of cognitive inertia. It means that while there might be excellent data on specific components (volume, salinity, price) there is very poor visibility into Living Systems Integrity & Capacity (LSIC) or the condition of living systems and their capacity to keep providing essential functions over time, which underpins them all. Think of LSIC as the Basin’s operating buffer. When it shrinks, volatility rises and when that happens decisions flip from manageable trade-offs to non-linear failure modes.

Consider a single allocation decision in the upper Darling. On its own, it looks small, just a few gigalitres released or withheld in a system that handles billions. Conventional governance would assess it on size alone and conclude it isn't material. But that single decision sits at a junction where ecology, agriculture, cultural practice and downstream community viability all meet.

A small change at that node cascades through every dimension that depends on it and most of the consequences won't arrive immediately. They show up years later as fish kills, crop failures, lost cultural access or stranded entitlements by which point the decision is impossible to retrace and the people responsible have moved on.

This is what most risk registers miss. Materiality in governance is almost always assessed by scale alone, asking is the issue big enough to warrant our attention? The Murray-Darling reveals two other axes that count just as much.

Coupling materiality asks whether the issue sits at a node where small changes cascade across the system.

Temporal materiality asks how long the gap is between signal and consequence.

A water allocation decision scores low on scale, near-maximum on coupling and high on temporal lag.

The temporal lag between extraction and ecological collapse can stretch years, meaning decisions calibrated to a limited subset of current observations are almost always going to be systematically late.

What changes when you stop measuring only flows and start tracking LSIC? Here are some examples of signals that could reveal whether the living system of a river is retaining integrity and capacity:

• Low-flow days + heat stress overlap (risk of stratification and fish kills)

• Connectivity indicators (are floodplains and refuges connected at the right times?)

• Water quality thresholds (temperature, dissolved oxygen, salinity) tied to ecological trigger points

• Environmental water reliability (how often planned allocations actually arrive and when)

• Cultural access signals (can Traditional Owners safely fish, gather and practice on Country?)

• Early warning dashboards that combine flows + temperature + dissolved oxygen into a “red flag” score for local reaches.

"A signal becomes decision-grade only when it's wired to a trigger threshold, a choice it informs and an owner with a cycle for review."

These signals become decision-grade when they are wired to a trigger threshold, a clear choice it informs (release, restriction, investment, enforcement) and an owner with a cycle for review.

Inertia is not just laziness or a lack of insight; it is the manifestation of the complexity paradox. Every time there is new policy or central agency built to preserve or fix the river, a layer of administrative duties is added which ultimately distances decision makers from the territory that is being mapped. This is effectively trading relational capital which is based on the trust between an individual or entity charged with governance over a natural asset and the local community whose livelihood depends on it for compliance with a set of regulations.

An over-reliance on "static reporting" based on retrospective data which faithfully transmits what happened last year rather than real-time, dynamic sensing means that what is measured is what is easy to count and model (megalitres delivered), rather than what is vital (system health).

The risk is that while the "Administrative River” is being very efficiently managed, the "Living River" is accumulating systemic debt. As the tragic example of Menindee proves, when the territory votes, it votes last and it votes hard.

From Asset Management to Systemic Stewardship

To escape this trap, the operating model needs to shift from a sole focus on Asset Management to incorporating Systemic Stewardship.

Asset Management asks: “Is the asset performing according to its design specifications?” It views the river as a piece of infrastructure to be maintained.

Systemic Stewardship asks: “Is the system that sustains us retaining its capacity to heal and regenerate?” It views the river as a web of relationships to be stewarded.

The distinction matters operationally. Asset management is restorative by design and there is a clear imperative to maintain to spec and return to baseline when degraded. Systemic stewardship is regenerative in that it cultivates the conditions for the system to sustain function under conditions that haven't been encountered yet. In a non-stationary climate, the baseline itself is moving and governance calibrated to return to a prior state is aiming at a target that no longer exists.

It acknowledges that you cannot command-and-control a complex adaptive system. You can't just "deliver" water to a wetland and expect culture to flourish if the timing, quality and governance of that water are disconnected from the people who belong to it.

Critics may wave the concept of Systemic Stewardship away as a romantic and impractical pipe dream. The data suggests that it is actually extremely pragmatic and imminently implementable. In the Rhine River basin for example, a shift to polycentric, non-binding coordination restored Atlantic Salmon to a river once deemed the ‘sewer of Europe’ (ICPR, 1987). In Florida’s Kissimmee River, restoring natural flow dynamics reversed decades of asphyxiation caused by channelling (Koebel, 1995). It is not a metaphor but a methodology and an investment in resilience.

This shift requires Immersion. You cannot steward a system you cannot see, and you cannot see a complex system from a desk in a capital city. You have to close the fidelity gap between the map and the territory.

These considerations resonate beyond government. For corporates and investors, river-system integrity isn’t a values debate it’s an operating-base constraint. Water reliability and basin health shape input availability, production uptime, site approvals, insurance pricing, community consent and the stability of regional workforces. When LSIC declines, risk shifts from ‘manageable’ to ‘non-linear’ bringing with it sudden restrictions, reputational shocks, project delays and higher cost of capital. This is a measurement system calibrated to one axis — financial scale — while the risks that will actually determine outcomes operate on the other two: systemic coupling and temporal delay.

The practical question for boards isn’t just what you disclose but what your governance cadence measures, who owns the signals and how fast you can respond when the territory shifts.

In practice, this work usually starts with a short executive briefing to pin down the decision gate and produce a one-page decision starting point around what's at stake, what's unknown and what would change the decision. From there, a focused risk diagnostic maps LSIC dependencies and impacts into a coupling hotspots view, detailing what the system relies on, what it degrades and where the early warning signals actually sit. Alongside this is a reality check on what data is genuinely decision-grade. Where the stakes justify it, the next move is a stress-test sprint including scenario exposure, an explicit options set, defensible value ranges and a board-ready memo that makes the trade-offs legible. To make this stick beyond a single episode, it needs to be embedded through program charters, cadence, thresholds, named owners and an evidence chain that keeps the signals alive in governance.

The Practice of Immersion: The Aboriginal Waterways Assessment

What does Systemic Stewardship look like in practice? Less like a satellite map or GIS layer and more like the Country centric method of the Aboriginal Waterways Assessment (AWA).

Developed by the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN), the Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations (NBAN), and the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), the AWA is a tool that moves from inertia to immersion.

Unlike standard hydrological models, the AWA cannot be completed remotely. It requires being on Country. It brings Traditional Owners, scientists, and government planners together on the riverbank to assess the health of the system using metrics that are invisible to standard analytical frames:

1. Place Status: Is this place culturally significant? Would we return here?

2. Current Use: Is the river healthy enough to support cultural practices (fishing, ceremony, teaching)?

3. Cultural Stream Health: What is the spiritual and physical condition of the water?

AWA isn’t a cultural overlay. It’s a Country-based diagnostic led by Traditional Owners that makes system condition legible in ways standard models often miss. Standard environmental assessments are implicitly restorative. They measure deviation from a reference condition. The AWA asks something different around whether the system retains the capacity to sustain relationship and practice into the future. Country-based custodial practice doesn't aim to freeze a system in a prior state but reads its generative capacity. That's a regenerative orientation and this is exactly why an AWA produces signals that standard monitoring architectures literally cannot encode.

In IDM terms it changes the evidence base. It turns ‘cultural impact’ from a consultation footnote into a decision-relevant signal that can be tracked, debated and acted on. This is also a structural test of the decision frame itself forcing a central query on who is affected by these allocations but absent from the process? Whose knowledge could change the outcome? Governance that doesn't ask these questions isn't just incomplete it's loading risk onto the people least equipped to absorb it.

Social return on investment (SROI) analyses from comparable Indigenous ranger programs have found social returns in the order of ~3:1 (Social Ventures Australia, 2016), indicating this is an investment in resilience not just a ‘nice-to-have’.

"A river can have high volumes and be compliant with regulations while still being culturally inaccessible."

An AWA produces a high-fidelity map which can often reveal a brutal truth. A river can have high volumes and be compliant with regulations while still being culturally inaccessible.

By using the AWA, government planners aren't just adding a "cultural stakeholder" column to their database. They are stepping into the system. They are seeing the river through the lens of deep time and continuous custodianship. This is the shift from Inertia (managing the volume) to Immersion (stewarding the relationship).

Three Lenses for Making the River Legible

To operationalise this shift, we can use the three Emerdigm diagnostic lenses to update our institutional maps. These lenses aren’t three separate analyses. Integrated decision-making is what happens when you braid them together at the moment of choice so the map you use is equivalent to the territory your governance is accountable to.

Lens 1: Systems Thinking (The Living System)

Systems Thinking reveals the river is not a pipe but a circulatory system. Feedback loops connect flows, floodplains, groundwater, ecosystems, communities and governance incentives. Through this lens we can see that narrow target can be “met” while the system degrades.

Lens 2: Impact Accounting (The Living Ledger)

Impact Accounting reframes cultural flows and system function as assets, not stakeholder commentary. If we degrade cultural value and ecological capacity while meeting output KPIs, we are eroding national wealth even when GDP looks fine. LSIC becomes the operating buffer, establishing the stocks (condition) and capacity (service ability) that determine whether the Basin can keep delivering outcomes.

Lens 3: Regenerative Futures (The Living Bridge)

Regenerative Futures shifts the aim from “sustainable diversion” (doing less harm) to “regenerative flow” by cultivating the river's capacity to sustain its functions under changing conditions. Immersion means designing governance that can feel the territory utilising place-based signals, cultural continuity and ecological thresholds.

The Journey to Immersion: A Practical Path for the Public Servant

Practicing Systemic Stewardship doesn’t necessarily require a complete rewrite of legislation. It begins by navigating differently through daily bureaucracy.

Step 0: Name the decision gate

What decision are you actually trying to improve? Is it focussed on allocation, operating plan, enforcement, project approval, investment, procurement? If you can’t name the decision, you can’t improve it.

Step 1: Notice the Silo

Where does the "map" stop? If working in environmental flows, is the cultural status of the wetland being accounted for? If working in compliance, can the river really be seen or is it just a meter reading? Start by acknowledging the boundaries of current datasets.

Step 2: Bridge the Data

Avoid treating qualitative data as "soft" and quantitative data as "hard." The AWA proves that cultural health can be rigorously assessed and mapped. Use tools that integrate Indigenous science with Western hydrology to build a "composite map" of the territory.

Step 3: Change the Question

When you feel the gravitational pull of compliance - the need to "feed the beast" of the Department - pause and switch lenses using the three diagnostics in this essay (systems, ledger, futures) before you finalise the file.

Step 4: Make it governance-ready

Assign an owner, a cadence, trigger thresholds and an evidence trail. If a signal can’t be reviewed in-cycle and tied to a defined action (continue / pause / escalate / redesign), it won’t change outcomes.

Step 5: Become a Metagovernor

You do not need to wait for a departmental restructure to break a silo. In the absence of a unified authority, effective stewardship relies on 'informal coordination' or the trading of favours and data between professionals who care about the outcome. Your role is not just to regulate, but to connect the actors who hold the pieces of the puzzle.

The Inertia View: "Is this water release compliant with the current operational plan and within the Sustainable Diversion Limit?" (Focus: Legal safety, volume, short-term efficiency).

The Immersion View: "Does this decision support the Living Systems Integrity & Capacity of the river and its people?" (Focus: Systemic health, resilience, long-term value).

Conclusion: Owning the Consequences

So, who owns the river?

In the state of Inertia, the Crown owns the water and the department manages the rights. But Aqua Nullius is a brittle fiction which cracks easily under pressure.

In the state of Immersion, a more uncomfortable truth is accepted: No one owns the river, but everyone owns the consequences.

"No one owns the river, but everyone owns the consequences."

Fiduciary duty is shifting. To ignore the signals of the living river is no longer just bad policy; it is a breach of the duty to act with care and diligence.

The transition to a state of immersion is not a leap into the unknown, but a structured evolution through three operational stages.

First, moving from paper water to living water. Static historical models are restorative by design and they assume a recoverable baseline. Climate-adaptive, real-time management is the bridge but the destination is regenerative. A form of governance that designs for emergence and adaptive capacity rather than return to a prior state, allowing for multi-criteria decisions and accounting for compound risks.

Second, going from silos to systems, evolving fragmented jurisdictions into a meta-governance model that manages interconnected capitals and coordinates the horizontal links between environmental health and regional solvency.

Finally, there is a progression from consultation to custodianship. Recognising First Nations not as stakeholders to be managed, but as the primary practitioners of stewardship for millennia. Replacing tokenistic inclusion with genuine co-governance, utilising tools like the AWA to measure value beyond extraction.

Regulation itself cannot bring back a stable and wet climate. That will require a change in the resolution of the maps being used. These will need to be built with tools that function as boundary objects with mechanisms robust enough to maintain scientific integrity but flexible enough to integrate Country-based knowledge into policy settings without stripping them of meaning.

The AWA program is the prototype for this new ‘Immersive State’. It is more than just a cultural consultation exercise or an add-on to existing assessment frameworks. It is a sovereign, Country-based method led by Traditional Owners, with collaboration from agencies and scientists where invited. Its purpose is not to translate Country into bureaucratic language for convenience but to ensure water planning is accountable to the living system and to the people with enduring responsibilities to it. By integrating the AWA model, it is possible to move from the inertia of top-down technocracy to immersion, to a state of intelligence-driven governance where the river’s pulse is monitored through both high-resolution sensors and deep ancestral knowledge. Rather than undermining the position of the state, co-producing shared definitions and categories validates effective management by grounding it in the reality of the territory.

Immersion means shifting from managing entitlements to stewarding relationships and recognising First Nations authority as governance, not garnish. The river doesn’t need romantic attention it needs decision systems that respect Country, share power and act with purpose and conviction.

If you’re working in government, research or a water-exposed sector and want to operationalise immersion, we run briefings and workshops that translate LSIC into governance cadence, evidence trails and practical decision prompts.

Next in the Series, we move from the riverbank to the Treasury in Essay 2: “The Tyranny of a Single Number,” where the same rigorous analytical insights will be applied to the economy’s favourite map: GDP.

References & Further Reading

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Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA). Aboriginal Waterways Assessment Program. https://www.mdba.gov.au/water-management/cultural-water/aboriginal-waterways-assessment

Mooney, W., & Cullen, A. (2019). Implementing the Aboriginal Waterways Assessment tool: collaborations to engage and empower First Nations in waterway management. Australasian Journal of Environmental Management. https://doi.org/10.1080/14486563.2019.1645752

Australian Academy of Science (2019). Investigation of the causes of mass fish kills in the Menindee Region NSW over summer 2018–2019. https://www.science.org.au/supporting-science/science-policy-and-sector-analysis/reports-and-publications/fish-kills-report

Pensions for Purpose. Systemic Stewardship: Challenges & Strategies for Change. https://www.pensionsforpurpose.com/

Zedler, J. B., & Callaway, J. C. (1999). Tracking wetland restoration: do mitigation sites follow desired trajectories? Restoration ecology, 7(1), 69-73. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1526-100X.1999.07108.x 

Moore, H. E., Rutherfurd, I. D., Peel, M. C., & Horne, A. (2020). ‘Sub-Prime’ Water, Low-Security Entitlements and Policy Challenges in Over-Allocated River Basins: the Case of the Murray–Darling Basin. Environmental Management, 66(2), 202–217. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-020-01303-7

Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). (2025). Discussion paper on identification, assessment and disclosure of dependencies and impacts on nature in financial portfolios. https://tnfd.global/

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Kelman, S. (2021). Bureaucracies as Innovative Organizations. Harvard Kennedy School Faculty Research Working Paper Series, RWP21-017. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/publications/bureaucracies-innovative-organizations

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Anderson, D. H., et al. (2005). Kissimmee River Restoration Studies: Evaluation Program. South Florida Water Management District. https://www.sfwmd.gov/

Koebel, J. W. (1995). An Historical Perspective on the Kissimmee River Restoration Project. Restoration Ecology, 3(3), 149-159. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1526-100X.1995.tb00167.x

Social Ventures Australia. (2016). Social Return on Investment Analysis of the Warddeken Indigenous Protected Area and Associated Indigenous ranger Programme. Report for the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet. (Cited in Assessing the Value of Ecosystem Services). https://www.socialventures.com.au/

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Fawcett, P., & Wood, M. (2015). Becoming a Metagovernor: A Case Study of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2500644

Matta, D. (2025). Regenerative Governance Through Meta-Awareness: The Strategic Value Ecology Model and Framework.

Commonwealth Climate Law Initiative. (2021). Fiduciary Duties and Climate Change in the United States. https://ccli.ubc.ca/

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Investor Group on Climate Change (IGCC). (2025). Systems Stewardship: Managing Interconnected Climate Risks for Lasting Value. University of Technology Sydney. https://igcc.org.au/

Alexandra, J. (2020). The science and politics of climate risk assessment in Australia's Murray Darling Basin. Environmental Science & Policy. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2020.06.005

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Maclean, K. (2015). Crossing cultural boundaries: Integrating Indigenous water knowledge into water governance. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.12.012