Learning from Indigenous water science to re-think water wisdoms: insights from Australia

Jessica Weir, Associate Professor, Western Sydney University – who will be at IHE Delft in person -  interrogates the over-allocation of fresh water in Australia’s agricultural heartland, showing how the political-legal resurgence of Indigenous people in recent decades is prompting a reconsideration of government water regulations and policies. This entails not just redressing the discriminatory treatment of Indigenous people and their expert knowledge, but also helps build the capacity for intercultural communication thereby beginning to uncover paradigm shifting possibilities and realities of water relationality.

Kate Harriden, Research Fellow, Monash Sustainable Development Institute, Monash University – who will join  online - compares the relational accountability of indigenous sciences with the relational obduracy of ‘western’ science. The latter supports the pernicious ‘aqua nullius’ idea that makes the appropriation of waters by settler-colonizers seem justified. She shows how the framework of relational accountability, anchored in the notion that water has life, can transform water management.

Jessica Weir is a white non-Indigenous scholar with Scottish and English ancestors who flexed imperial and colonial privilege to move to Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has been taught by Indigenous friends, colleagues and collaborators for decades to understand nature and society in relation. She works as an Associate Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and a Visiting Fellow at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University.

Kate Harriden is wiradyuri woman who is keen to decolonize streams and contemporary water management approaches. She grew up in the creek behind the family home and still spends lots of time in streams, even if many of them are now storm water channels. She works as a Research Fellow at the Monash Sustainable Development Institute at Monash University, and is a PhD scholar at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University (among other affiliations).

The seminar will be moderated by Margreet Zwarteveen, IHE Delft Professor of Water Governance.