In your example, because many businesses (majority white owned) have riparian rights and those who live on the land need equal access despite being historically disadvantaged from gaining access to said water rights.
I understand the concept of "riparian rights", but I fail to see how gov't entities who issue water licences (or any government service, for that matter) would need to "consider [...] the need to redress the results of past racial and gender discrimination".
I'm trying to apply that logic to any of my gov't services, and it would be outrageous to have any random thing responsible with redressing past racial discrimination, water rights, maternity rights, access to public information, literally any government service. It couldn't possibly be in their purview to take such a thing into consideration.
