Amid a renewed push to extract water for agriculture and mining, Indigenous advocacy in northern Australia has resulted in the introduction of a new water allocation mechanism: a reserve of water to be retained for the use and benefit of Indigenous communities. Our socio-legal analysis of the Oolloo Water Allocation Plan shows that the Strategic Aboriginal Water Reserves carry essential hallmarks of neoliberal property relations and are founded in the modernist mode of regulating extracted water as a commodity divisible from land, amenable to partitioning and disarticulated from socio-cultural relations. Informed by ethnographic material from the Daly River region gathered over almost a century, we describe the hydro-social relations that are created through customary traditions and practices, water planning and licencing, and the interaction between different scales of water movement and decision-making by both the state and Traditional Owners. The paper contributes in several ways to research that has identified ontological conflicts as central to disagreements over water and pointed to the difficulty of articulating theoretical framings of ontological difference with the practical work of water negotiations. It shows how the new Indigenous water rights discourse that coincided with the commodification of water in wider Australia shaped the way in which Aboriginal people of this region have more recently articulated their relationships to the Daly River and the limits to state recognition of those relationships. We find that the Reserve model is unable to recognize the capacity of water to connect and unify people and other beings, as well as to define boundaries between them. Within a regime that facilitates resource extraction, a limited opening has been created for Aboriginal people to benefit from this model of economic development, yet we argue that there is reason to fear that the divisions the Aboriginal Water Reserve enacts between waters and land presents significant socio-cultural risks.

中文翻译：

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北领地原住民水权政策中的本体论冲突

在重新推动农业和采矿业取水的过程中，澳大利亚北部的原住民倡导引入了新的水分配机制：保留水储备供原住民社区使用和造福。我们对奥卢水分配计划的社会法律分析表明，战略性原住民水资源储备带有新自由主义财产关系的基本特征，并建立在现代主义模式下，将抽取的水作为与土地可分割的商品进行管理，易于划分并与社会分离。 -文化关系。根据近一个世纪以来从戴利河地区收集的民族志材料，我们描述了通过习惯传统和实践、水规划和许可以及不同规模的水运动和决策之间的相互作用而建立的水社会关系。国家和传统所有者。该论文以多种方式为研究做出了贡献，该研究已确定本体论冲突是水问​​题分歧的核心，并指出了在水谈判的实际工作中阐明本体论差异的理论框架的困难。它展示了与澳大利亚更广泛的水商品化同时发生的新的土著水权话语如何塑造了该地区土著人民最近阐明他们与戴利河的关系以及国家承认这些关系的限制的方式。我们发现，保护区模型无法认识到水连接和团结人类和其他生物的能力，也无法定义他们之间的界限。在促进资源开采的体制内，为原住民从这种经济发展模式中受益创造了有限的开放空间，但我们认为，有理由担心原住民水资源保护区在水域和土地之间的划分会带来重大的社会影响。 -文化风险。