Cry me a river: building trust and maintaining legitimacy in environmental flows

Water reforms in Australia over a decade ago have seen large-scale recovery of water for the environment. While the recovery programme commenced with bilateral political support, there has remained ongoing debate in the media around the recovery volume, method of recovery and delivering of this water through the river system. In November 2017, a group of academics and practitioners met to discuss the need for legitimacy as a core component of environmental water programmes. We discuss legitimacy in terms of both the process and outcome of an environmental water programme. This article, along with the others in the special issue, makes the case for investing in community support for, and demonstrating outcomes from, environmental water programmes.