Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines the concept of friction in global change, the multi-scalar manifestations of the rights of nature movement, and the subsequent contribution of ethnographic data in identifying its strengths and limitations in response to local hydrosocial priorities and realities.

Paper long abstract:

In Victoria, First Nations peoples and their knowledges have historically been excluded from political processes relating to water governance, despite enduring custodial rights and responsibilities to care for Country. Policy reform was not forthcoming until 2017 with the passage of the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act 2017, which protects the Birrarung (Yarra River) and its parklands as a single living entity. The legislation is informed by transnational environmental ethics that are contributing to increasingly juridical, eco-centric, protectionist approaches to freshwater governance and that find their conceptual inspiration in Indigenous worldviews. Already subject to considerable legal analysis, ethnographic perspectives can contribute to better understandings of the implications of these highly mobile frameworks at local scales. This paper will draw on early stages of ethnographic fieldwork with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community along the Birrarung (Yarra River) in Narrm (Melbourne). Conceiving the Birrarung as a ‘zone of awkward engagement’ (Tsing, 2005, p. xi) connecting transnational ideologies, local policy and Indigenous waterscapes, the paper will reveal the productive potential of friction in the collective negotiation of ideologically divergent priorities within a dynamic network of hydrosocial relations.