Technical Reports
An Evaluation of the Corporate Governance Arrangements of Australian Irrigation Water Providers. CRC IF Technical Report No. 09/07.
McKay, J. (2007). An Evaluation of the Corporate Governance Arrangements of Australian Irrigation Water Providers. CRC for Irrigation Futures Technical Report No. 09/07. November 2007.
Executive Summary
The aim of this research is to determine which Corporate Governance Typology best facilitates the Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) outcomes intended by the Council of Australian Governments (CoAG) and National Water Initiative (NWI) mandated institutional separation of water service providers from environmental resource managers.
Governance is the process of decision making in the community involving both formal and informal actors at all levels. Government is just one of the formal actors in governance. The institutions and organisations it creates by laws and regulations are the formal actors in the process of extracting, distributing and using water. There are of course many informal institutions as well, such as customs of the society with respect to water use and allocation and in relation to enforcement of the law.
After the Council of Australian Government reforms in 1994 there were many laws creating many types of organisations to extract, distribute and use water in each State. This paper reports on work to examine the formal legal processes. The work established that there are now 14 different types of corporate organisations supplying water in Australia. These formal organisations and the informal institutions have different responses to the formal water law and policy changes. The responses of the formal organisations and informal institutions are instrumental to the success of the new water law and policy reforms under the National Water Initiative.
The Project has three phases:
Establishment of a typology of the Corporate Governance types of Australian Water Supply Businesses
A content analysis of the Annual Reports of a sample of these businesses to determine the content of reporting, and
Interviews with a sample of the CEOs of Australian Water Supply businesses to determine what are barriers to ESD implementation and if these are related to Corporate
Governance type.
The results presented here look at their responses to Australia’s changing water policies. In particular evaluating the effort put into ESD by the responding CEOs, the difficulty in pleasing regulators (environment and pricing), the amount of information they have about water policy and ESD, and their level of trust in their State government.
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17 Nov 2008
