Strategic uncertainty and the delay of groundwater regulation in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin (1886–1914)

Abstract Since the advent of large-scale groundwater extraction in the late 19th century, efforts to regulate use have encountered not only infrastructural and logistical challenges but also political resistance rooted in water users’ strategic appeals to property rights and incomplete knowledge. This article examines early groundwater development in Australia’s Great Artesian Basin (1886–1914) to show how courts, legislators, and water users invoked groundwater’s invisibility to frame it as unknowable and therefore ungovernable. Drawing on scientific reports, parliamentary debates, and historical news media, it demonstrates that uncertainty was not simply a natural product of subterranean hydrology but was institutionalized through legal doctrines and strategically mobilized to delay oversight. The case situates groundwater within the political ecology of water, showing how claims of uncertainty have historically been used to obstruct state intervention and create path-dependent extraction regimes that became economically and culturally entrenched long after scientific consensus emerged.