Changing from Unrestricted Access to Sustainable Abstraction Management Regimes: Lessons Learnt from France and Australia

This concluding chapter compares the important features of the groundwater policy and management approaches that have been implemented in France and Australia and draws lessons that may be relevant to other countries who are implementing groundwater management regimes. To support the comparison, the chapter looks at six main stages of the policy development process: (1) political awareness raising; (2) increasing the groundwater knowledge base; (3) defining and allocating water use rights; (4) defining sustainability objectives and setting extraction limits; (5) returning over-allocated and overused ground-water systems to sustainable levels of extraction; and (6) enforcement policies.