Water sovereignty for Indigenous Peoples: Pathways to pluralist, legitimate and sustainable water laws in settler colonial states
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In settler colonial states, the doctrine of discovery that dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of their lands also took their waters. The original water theft of colonization was underpinned by the erroneous assumption of ‘aqua nullius’ and remains almost entirely unacknowledged and largely unaddressed. Scholarly literature has focused on the injustice of this water theft and the human rights of Indigenous Peoples (under UNDRIP as well as their human right to water). This review shows that aqua nullius also renders settler state water law not fit for purpose in two important ways. Firstly, the legitimacy of settler state water laws is contested, presenting a foundational challenge to water governance, and failing to acknowledge the plurality of water laws in settler colonial states. Secondly, settler water law is experiencing a more widespread failure to deliver ecologically sustainable water management. In responding to the injustice of aqua nullius, foundational reform of settler state water laws can enable the settler state to learn from Indigenous laws that have supported thriving communities and genuinely sustainable water management for millennia. Drawing on examples from Aotearoa New Zealand, the USA, Canada, and Australia, this review shows how acknowledging, and challenging, the false assumption of aqua nullius creates novel pathways for reform, enabling pluralist water laws and water governance models that improve both legitimacy and sustainability of settler state water governance.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it