Enabling anticipatory governance of climate adaptation in Australia’s Murray–Darling Basin

Like for many river basins around the world, climate projections foretell a hotter, drier future for the Murray–Darling Basin (MDB). If the most drastic scenarios play out, the current suite of economies, industries, and ecosystems is unlikely to remain viable in the coming decades. Such changes will stress already fractured decision-making processes, where institutions are working to regain trust in a highly contested policy sphere. The upcoming review and revision of the National Water Initiative (2004), the Water Act (2007), and the Murray–Darling Basin Plan (2012) provide an opportunity to address critiques that they currently do not adequately address climate change. In this paper, we analyse qualitative interviews with 42 experts from diverse sectors in the Basin–research, government, advocacy, and industry–to articulate the challenges associated with the governance of climate risks and adaptation in the MDB. We draw on the concept of anticipatory governance–distinguishing it from both adaptation governance and adaptive governance–to identify four governance transitions and three governance interventions that could be mobilised to address these challenges. We argue that governing the deep uncertainty of climate change requires moving beyond adaptive governance’s reactive learning to anticipatory governance that institutionalises foresight, redistributes power, and acts on plausible futures before thresholds are crossed.