2022 Sir Ian Barker Published Article Award: Dr Elizabeth Macpherson
“Can Western water law become more ‘relational’?” is a survey of comparative laws affecting water across Australasia and the Americas’ written by Dr Elizabeth Macpherson from the University of Canterbury’s Faculty of Law.
An Associate Professor in Law at the University of Canterbury, Dr Elizabeth Macpherson’s research interests are in comparative environmental and natural resources law and relationships with human rights and indigenous rights in Australasia and Latin America. She is the author of the award-winning book Indigenous Water Rights in Law and Regulation: Lessons from Comparative Experience (2019, Cambridge University Press).
The paper was an invited article from the Royal Society Te Apārangi following the author’s recognition in the 2021 Research Honours Aotearoa awards with an Early Career Research
Excellence Award for Humanities. That award was for Dr Elizabeth’s work exploring opportunities for indigenous peoples’ water rights in laws and policies around the world and resulted in this article’s publication in the Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand 53:3, 395-424 (Published online: 27 November 2022).
“The article notes the ‘relational turn’ in social sciences that has now captured the attention of legal scholars, broadly based on ideas of relatedness, relationships and belonging between people and places,” state the Adjudicators. “Dr Elizabeth applies this to the law of governments, indigenous peoples and water itself with a critical analysis of recent legal developments in Aotearoa, Australia, Colombia, Mexico, the United States, Canada and Chile.
The article is that of a comparative legal scholar who has drawn on her 20 years of practical legal and research experience in all of those seven nations. Few Anglophone comparative law scholars on settler/Indigenous issues pay sufficient attention to jurisprudence and research in Latin American jurisdictions that may provide useful comparative data and perspectives.
That this author engages fully with developments in Colombia, Mexico and Chile as well as North America and Australasia is a major reason that this article stands out as fully deserving of this award. Aware that there are dangers of western conservationist approaches excluding indigenous peoples from their territories and resources, the author provides nuanced accounts of the possibilities for relational thinking that embraces legal pluralism.”
