Over the last decade there has been a $AUD16B investment in water reform in Australia, focusing on redressing the balance between water for agriculture and water for the environment. The scale of this endeavor has been ambitious, the process fractious, and the outcomes complex. The overall ambition for better management of water for the environmental was to enable large-scale adaptive management, informed by high-quality monitoring, evaluation and research. As water reform under the Murray Darling Basin Plan moves towards its major review, it is timely to consider the aspiration of the program and how well it has been delivered. While there have been substantive efforts in monitoring, evaluation and research the quantum of investment has been inadequate to fully assess outcomes at the scales required by legislation. In particular, scaling relatively small numbers of focal areas for evaluation up to basin-scale has been challenging. While the intent was to apply adaptive management principles, a number of factors have prevented this being fully realised. There was no clear social engagement to determine objectives, and as a consequence social license to complete the reforms has wavered. Communication and engagement activities have not been adequate to build a narrative around the reforms and have been targetted locally rather than nationally. The lack of an integrated social-ecological perspective on water reform in the Murray Darling Basin has made achieving policy and management outcomes challenging and has ultimately hindered delivering all of the potential benefits. Moving into the next generation of water reform in Australia there is a need to reset, consider integrated ways forward and achieve deeply-based social buy-in in order to safeguard social and ecological values.