Purpose This study aims to assess whether Tukad Bindu, Bali, Indonesia is a good example of ecotourism or practice in greenwashing. Design/methodology/approach The characteristics of ecotourism to assess Tukad Bindu were identified through a review of the existing literature. This study used Honey’s argument to determine these characteristics and supplemented them with other experts’ views to understand the global and local contexts of ecotourism. Primary data were collected from interviews with stakeholders and observations. The Tukad Bindu Foundation provided secondary data. Findings This study reveals that Tukad Bindu is a good example of ecotourism because it involves travelling to natural destinations. It reduces the negative effects of tourism activities – specifically environmental – thereby raising environmental awareness among local communities, tourists and the public at large. Tukad Bindu produces direct financial benefits for conservation, for empowering local communities and providing financial benefits, reverence for local cultures and positively influences the democratic movement, especially strengthening stakeholders’ participation in ecotourism. Research limitations/implications To accelerate the development of Tukad Bindu as an ecotourism destination, research on factors that enable and obstruct ecotourism development is required. This will help the foundation and stakeholders to develop strategies that can achieve the goals of conservation, local communities’ livelihoods and environmental education. Practical implications This study also has practical implications in terms of managing environmental activities, enriching Tukad Bindu’s biodiversity and attractions, and maintaining ecotourism sustainability. Originality/value Tukad Bindu has applied unique ecotourism practices, in terms of developing and ownership of protected areas. While Honey’s framework of ecotourism is beneficial to elaborate on the nature of ecotourism, the characteristics in this framework are not mutually exclusive in the case of Tukad Bindu. This study also has practical implications in terms of managing environmental activities, enriching Tukad Bindu’s biodiversity and attractions, and maintaining ecotourism sustainability.

This chapter analyzes sustainable river management in the Murray–Darling Basin, where growing salinity problems and decreasing security of supply began to cause political conflict between and within the four states that share the catchment. The Murray–Darling Basin Authority has been responsible for coordinating the management of storage reservoirs, major infrastructure, and cross-border flows since 1917. In recent years, however, water needs of different activities are mediated through the dynamics of the market rather than the decisions of government officials. In many regions in the basin, however, water management is more complex now than it was only a few decades ago. The shortage of skilled personnel to manage Australia’s highly modified hydrological systems, which is already making itself felt, could well prove the greatest risk in the medium and longer term.

Policy-making is frequently described as a response to problems, but the problems which policy workers address are naturally occurring phenomena. Environmental policy in the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB) offers an interesting illustration of the emergence of both a policy issue and of the construction of an institutional framework for addressing it, in the course of which the Murray–Darling Basin emerged as a location for policy work. The MDB extends across more than one million square kilometres of inland south-east Australia and supports approximately 40 per cent of Australia’s rural economy including 75 per cent of all irrigation, is home to just under two million people and supplies much of the water used by another million in South Australia. The initial moves were to bring the River Murray Commission arrangements into line with the standard model for intergovernmental management in Australia, with a number of bureaucratic committees crowned by a ministerial council.

The article which was recently published contained a minor error in Figure 2a. The author incorrectly provided the image during production process. The correct figure is given in this article.

The recent development of high dikes to support rice production, upland crops, cattle rearing, and commercial aquaculture in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta has significantly diminished wild fish catch and aquatic animals that are important food sources for the poor. Changes to agro-ecological systems in An Giang Province during three periods are reviewed: before 1975, when a network of canals was established; during the Doi Moi policy reforms of the 1980s, when a rice-based farming system based on low or August dikes was introduced; and more recently, when a new farming system based on high dikes replaced the low dike system. This most recent transition occurred in parallel with the introduction of large-scale commercial aquaculture and the market economy. Under pressure from government targets and market forces, most farmers are now using the high dikes, fertilizers, pesticides, and pumping technology to produce three rice crops each year. However, the new production systems have severely reduced the habitat available to inland freshwater wild fish and other aquatic food resources. This has negatively impacted nutrition for many poor families who had depended on wild fish caught in the commons for much of their food and offers lessons for development of other tropical delta regions. This paper proposes a research agenda that would investigate the socioeconomic, nutritional, and water and energy use impacts of the changes in production systems that have occurred in rural communities in the Mekong Delta.

Implementation of water reform in the Murray–Darling Basin has stalled. The principles remain in legislation, but government priorities are increasingly focused on irrigation-based agriculture rather than the comprehensive range of stakeholders with a legitimate interest in decisions about the future of the MDB. The negotiations required to gain parliamentary approval of the MDB Basin Plan in 2012 resulted in extensive concessions. Some have seriously damaged its integrity as a reform package. Within this now fragmented policy framework, the utility of important individual components has been eroded. These include acceptance of the need for a comprehensive analytical framework able to take full account of costs and benefits, the precautionary principle, the beneficiary pays principle, consistent policies for assigning public benefit from public investment, the importance of a comprehensive whole-of-catchment framework for managing social and biophysical processes and the understanding that serious water reform requires change in the cultural values related to the water-human relationship. As a result of these compromises, the capacity of the Basin Plan framework to manage future climate change challenges and development pressures is in doubt. Can this trend be reversed? The paper argues for a revitalization of the public policy process to bring in a wider range of stakeholders and expose decision making to more rigorous assessment. To help achieve this goal, control over a substantial proportion of the environmental water entitlements acquired by the national government should be devolved to elected regional bodies (who would have to work within auditing guidelines). This would stimulate community involvement by providing a substantial activity that would make engagement worthwhile.

Water scarcity is increasingly dominating headlines throughout the world. In the southwestern USA, the looming water shortages on the Colorado River system and the unprecedented drought in California are garnering the greatest attention. Similar stories of scarcity and crisis can be found across the globe, suggesting an opportunity for sharing lessons and innovations. For example, the Colorado River and Australia's Murray-Darling Basin likely can share many lessons, as both systems were over-allocated, feature multiple jurisdictions, face similar climatic risks and drought stresses, and struggle to balance human demands with environmental needs. In this conference we cast our net broadly, exploring several salient topics including: trans-boundary cooperation, water marketing, Indigenous water rights, environmental and social water needs, and drought coping.This public event will be informed by three invitation-only meetings held immediately before the conference: an “Indigenous Water Justice” symposium; a “Social Dimensions of Environmental Water Management” workshop; and a “Drought Crises in Federations” symposium.

Groundwater is but one component of the hydrological cycle. It interacts with and is dependent on how the other components of the hydrological cycle are managed. The rationale for sharing or allocating groundwater is guided by the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization. There is no universal theory of justice to which we can appeal, to help us operationalise this principle to the satisfaction of all water uses and users. Often the losers in allocation decisions are marginal communities or disempowered individuals or groups, and the natural environment. This results in the emergence of a variety of social and environmental injustices, especially if the burden falls continuously on the same group or ecosystem. Social – Environmental justice is a useful lens in the arsenal of researchers, policy makers and natural resource managers that can be used to highlight the importance of a systems approach when dealing with common pool resources such as groundwater.

We analyse the threats of global environmental change, as they relate to food security. First, we review three discourses: (i) 'sustainable intensification', or the increase of food supplies without compromising food producing inputs, such as soils and water; (ii) the 'nexus' that seeks to understand links across food, energy, environment and water systems; and (iii) 'resilience thinking' that focuses on how to ensure the critical capacities of food, energy and water systems are maintained in the presence of uncertainties and threats. Second, we build on these discourses to present the causal, risks and options assessment for decision-making process to improve decision-making in the presence of risks. The process provides a structured, but flexible, approach that moves from problem diagnosis to better risk-based decision-making and outcomes by responding to causal risks within and across food, energy, environment and water systems.

We explore bioregional management in the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) in Australia through the institutional design characteristics of the MDB River Basin Organization (RBO), the actors and organizations who supported and resisted the establishment of the RBO, and the effectiveness of the RBO.During the last 25 years, there has been a major structural reform in the MDB RBO, which has changed from an interstate coordinating body to an Australian government agency.Responsibility for basin management has been centralized under the leadership of the Australian government, and a comprehensive integrated Basin plan has been adopted.The driving forces for this centralization include national policy to restore river basins to sustainable levels of extraction, state government difficulties in reversing overallocation of water entitlements, the millennium drought and its effects, political expediency on the part of the Australian government and state governments, and a major injection of Australian government funding.The increasing hierarchy and centralization of the MDB RBO does not follow a general trend toward multilevel participative governance of RBOs, but decentralization should not be overstated because of the special circumstances at the time of the centralization and the continuing existence of some decentralized elements, such as catchment water plans, land use planning, and water quality.Further swings in the centralization-decentralization pendulum could occur.The MDB reform has succeeded in rebalancing Basin water allocations, including an allocation for the environment and reduced diversion limits.There are some longer term risks to the implementation of reform, including lack of cooperation by state governments, vertical coordination difficulties, and perceived reductions in the accountability and legitimacy of reform at the local level.If implementation of the Basin plan is diverted or delayed, a new institution, the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, can play a major role in securing and coordinating environmental water supplies.

With a climate similar to southern Italy and Greece the Murray-Darling River Basin extends over more than a million square kilometers in the south-east corner of Australia. It contains most of the country's irrigation and has been at the center of the national debate about water management reform for more than three decades. One of the most controversial issues has been the introduction of a catchment-wide water market. Critics argue that markets are strengthening pressures for short-term economic development and making it increasingly difficult to achieve more sustainable river management and adjust to climate change. But during the recent very severe millennium drought the water market allowed water to be moved fairly easily from low value agricultural uses to high value uses resulting in almost no overall economic loss. Water reform in the MDB has long been subject to intense conflict between the national government and the four state governments in the catchment (and between the state governments against each other). The Australian national government is attempting to reshape the water governance framework through the introduction of a comprehensive Basin Plan backed by a large funding package that includes the equivalent of approximately $3 billion US to purchase water entitlements to achieve environmental improvements. The Basin Plan is designed to reverse over a century of development-induced decline and protect the MDB from the predicted impacts of climate change. While the Basin Plan falls short of its objectives in a number of significant ways it is still a serious effort to implement sustainable river management at a catchment wide scale. As such it provides a case study of international significance for the long running debate about how irrigation can be made sustainable and compatible with the increasing pressure to improve riverine environments.

Recent water reform in the Murray-Darling Basin has been strongly influenced by neo-liberal principles. Introduced in the 1990s the water market allowed irrigators to reduce the potential impact of a severe drought in the 2000s. It also made it possible for governments to purchase large volumes of water to slow the decline in resource security and the riverine environment, albeit through large payments for water entitlements handed out near free of cost earlier in the twentieth century. But the strength of neo-liberal perspectives among policy makers and the public is making it increasingly difficult to argue for programs that promote sustainability and resilience in anticipation of climate change when they conflict with profitability. Neoliberal purchaser-provider arrangements are also at the core of the Commonwealth Water Act 2007. It gives the national government control of high-level policy and states will be rewarded financially for implementing plans developed within its framework. This chapter predicts, however, that the distinction between purchaser and provider will collapse in the event of serious tension between the national government and the states because national government members of parliament are unlikely to allow serious financial penalties to be inflicted on voters in their state based electorates.