Irrigation development induces considerable environmental change, but the expectation has been in the past that the economic and social benefits would be greater than the environmental costs. However, public attitudes change over time from acceptance of development and exploitation to greater concern regarding environmental issues and sustainability. Recently, the irrigation industry has found it difficult to communicate to the wider populace the regional benefits of irrigation and the current activities and investment undertaken to address the environmental sustainability concerns. To address this, irrigation water supply businesses are investigating using a broader reporting structure that includes financial, environmental, and social and cultural elements. This triple bottom line, holistic approach should provide a more balanced view of water use with socio-economic benefits and environmental consequences demonstrated. It is anticipated that this approach embedded in the newly developed Irrigation Sustainability Assessment Framework will lead to a more transparent and informed debate on the sustainable use of resources between all parties.

In recent years in Australia, the most common policy response to a variety of urgent natural resource management dilemmas has been to rely on institutional mechanisms that appeal to private interest in the hope that these mechanisms will produce socially desirable outcomes. Market mechanisms have become the darlings of resource policy. This is clearly evident in debates over water policy, where a key assumption has been that the self-interest of market agents, as opposed to the good intentions of citizens, is the best way of managing this scarce resource. Behind this lies the thought that virtue is scarce and hence the good intentions of citizens cannot be relied upon; we should be thrifty in our dependence on virtue and, accordingly, our institutions should be virtue parsimonious. Yet such tacit ideas sit oddly with the ideals of stewardship that are endorsed in other areas of government policy, in which there is an expectation that resource users, and in particular farmers, should be responsible and care intrinsically for the resources society has entrusted in them. Here, good intentions do seem to have a role to play. Policy on one hand is driven by a belief that farmers will adjust resource use only in pursuit of private property, and on the other hand that they ought be prepared to subordinate the same private interest to the broader public good. In this chapter, we focus on the appeal to private interest as the dominant engine of public policy. We shall argue to the contrary that it is vital that we maintain ideals of responsibility and stewardship, which rely on the virtue of resource users and managers, as integral parts of policy. In making this case, we focus primarily on water use in Australia. We argue that minimising the reliance on virtue in water policy is not a rational response to the challenges facing us today. We shall defend policies that embed responsible use on the part of farmers and others into the core of our legal frameworks.

Other chapters in this book have highlighted that the concept of a social licence invokes responsibilities to the community and the environment that go beyond readily specified property rights, and clearly specified legal obligations. One of the mechanisms that has evolved in an attempt to realign legal interest with social expectations of moral 'rightness' is to convert these expectations into a legal duty of care. This chapter explores the concepts that underpin this novel approach to bridging the gap between largely undefined social responsibilities and more specific legal obligations. Duty of care has been incorporated into a number of natural resource statutes in the belief that it will provide an effective tool for promoting farmers' sustainable use of natural resources, while at the same time providing greater certainty of legal obligations with less 'red tape' cost to primary producers. This broad ambition of the farming sector is linked to meeting social licence and formal legal requirements, but what is concealed are different expectations about what is meant by duty of care and what it might achieve. The expectations range from legally requiring virtuous behaviour by farmers (achievement of which may deserve to be rewarded, perhaps by improved access to resources) to expectations of minimal legal accountability (non-achievement of which may justify punishment, perhaps by denial of access). These different expectations will be explored in this chapter, beginning with a discussion of the nature of environmental responsibility in relation to farmers. We will consider how the changing nature of that responsibility is at the heart of the emergence of statutory duty of care in natural resource regulations. There is a fundamental question of whether a statutory duty of care is intended to legally enforce a minimum level of performance, or require virtuous behaviour that takes into account wider expectations about public responsibility. Both conceptualisations are argued in advocacy of a farmer's legal duty of care for the environment.

Integrated governance arrangements to implement sustainability attempt to redefine the nature of human-environment interaction and foster more environmentally and socially beneficial outcomes from the use of resources. In this chapter, stewardship is examined as a foundation for resource management arrangements that connect natural resource use with landscape ecological limits and the social wellbeing of communities. The objective of the chapter is to evaluate catchment or watershed management approaches in four case studies that define stewardship expectations regarding resource user rights and interests. The evaluation adopts a model of stewardship to interrogate and extend resource user accountability for sustainability in a defined catchment or watershed.

Most irrigation in Australia was instigated with regional socio-economic development as a primary goal. The irrigation schemes were developed with grand visions of settling the interior and providing farming opportunities to soldiers returning from world wars. Thus it could be said that the master planners in government had a fledgling version of the triple bottom line in their sights. These visions have partly been realised with evidence from the Murrumbidgee and Murray basins of significant inland populations associated with the irrigated districts and an annual revenue of $3.1 billion associated with an investment into irrigation infrastructure valued at about $10 billion (Meyer 2005). ... Irrigation development induces considerable environmental change, but the expectation has been in the past that the economic and social benefits would be greater than the environmental costs. However, public attitudes have changed over time, from enthusiasm for development and exploitation to greater concern regarding environmental issues and sustainability. Recently, the irrigation industry has found it difficult to communicate to the wider populace and government the benefits of irrigation to their regions and to explain the activities and investment undertaken to tackle the environmental sustainability concerns. To rectify this, irrigation water supply businesses are investigating using a reporting structure that includes financial, environmental, and social and cultural elements. This triple bottom line, holistic approach is intended to provide a more balanced view of water use, with socio-economic benefits and environmental consequences demonstrated. It is anticipated that this approach will lead to a more transparent and informed debate on the sustainable use of resources between all parties. This chapter will provide an overview the story of irrigation in the Murray and Murrumbidgee basins, their current environmental and socio-economic conditions and the context for sustainability performance reporting by irrigation water suppliers. Two case studies of irrigation company performance reporting will be presented. The concept of sustainability introduces expectations of a social licence as practical concerns for irrigation water supply businesses. These concerns about demonstrating responsible performance go beyond the legal reporting requirements for annual financial and environmental compliance reporting.