Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemThe Role of Permitting Regimes in Western United States Groundwater Management.(Wiley, 2016-11)Related Content
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ItemLocal Groundwater Withdrawal Permitting Laws in the South-Western US: California in Comparative Context(Wiley, 2016)The Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA) aims to control, for the first time in California's history, the state's significant use and depletion of groundwater. SGMA gives local agencies a high degree of discretion in relation to a new permitting power, but the discretion is a double-edged sword: agencies gain maximum flexibility to tailor their regime to local conditions, yet the statute provides no direction on appropriate components of a groundwater permitting regime. We introduce SGMA and the broader legislative context to its permitting power, and we explain the continuing common law context in which the legislation operates. This information is used as the foundation for a comparative legal analysis of fundamental elements of permitting regimes. We compare a selection of six other south-western permitting regimes established in legislation for areas recognized as requiring intensive management through permitting: "special permitting areas" (SPAs). We find that permitting regimes in south-western SPAs share a structure containing several almost universal elements, although the policy settings that apply to those elements vary widely. The established permitting regimes in the other south-western states' SPAs may inform Californian agencies seeking to use their new permitting power for the first time, as well as water agencies further afield, as to important components of a permitting regime, and the different policy settings that could apply to those components. Californian local agencies, and its Department of Water Resources, which is charged with providing local agencies technical advice, should have regard to these permitting possibilities.
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ItemWhat Happens to Small Towns Whose Water Becomes Big Business for Bottled Brands?( 2018)Groundwater being pumped from a highland aquifer, only to be whisked away in tankers and sold in little plastic bottles by a multinational corporation – it’s a difficult concept for a small farming town to swallow.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableManaging the Hidden Water Beneath our Feet( 2019)Decision-makers have significant discretion when it comes to regulating groundwater, but there is too little transparency about how it is used and its effect on the local environment.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWhy do Australia’s Environmental Laws Fail to Save our Species from Extinction?( 2019)Transformative change is needed in Australia to deal with its extinction record, which is being further exacerbated by large resource extraction approvals and increased urbanization. Legal opportunities are procedurally and jurisdictionally complex and imaginative changes that can drive recovery efforts for ecosystems are urgently needed.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableFederalism and Environmental Frontiers( 2019)Allocating and coordinating powers over parts of the environment horizontally and vertically between governments can help – or hinder – efforts to address environmental problems. As the final blogger in this series, I explain how my research addresses this issue at the intersection of two of the major lines of inquiry of the IACL Research Group on New Frontiers of Federalism, with examples from several jurisdictions around the globe.