ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the adoption of an approach that sees water for agriculture as a complex social-ecological system would avoid the high costs of repeating past mistakes. It explains the concept of resilience and how it has been applied in the design and application of water reforms over the past twenty years in Australia. The chequered history of the development of Australia's water resources for agriculture since European settlement owes much to the pursuit of successive nation-building visions in a complex and only partially understood natural environment. The history of irrigated agriculture in Australia and the policies developed to deal with it are well documented. The Murray Darling Basin (MDB) is the exemplar of this history and highlights the complexity of managing water in an unpredictable climate in the face of multiple competing uses. Water licences were originally attached to land titles, ruling out their transfer between farms and regions in response to changing economic and climatic conditions.
