The concept of governance has multiple origins and meanings. The academic literature is eclectic and rather disjointed and the term can sometimes serve to obscure rather than clarify issues. For the purposes of the ICGP, we define ‘governance’ as: the evolving processes, relationships, institutions and structures by which a group of people, community or society organise themselves collectively to achieve the things that matter to them. To do this they need to make decisions about:

In other words, governance is as much about people, power, and relationships as it is about formal structures, management and corporate technicalities. Indeed, the relational aspects of governance are often critical factors in effective performance (Hunt and Smith 2006).

Governance is not culture-neutral. Assessments of what is ‘good’ about governance cannot be separated from culturally-based values and normative codes about what is ‘the right way’ to get things done. In an intercultural milieu, determining whose way is the ‘right way’ is frequently a contested issue. A related undercurrent running through recent Australian debates about Indigenous governance is the role of ‘culture’. To put it most starkly, some commentators question whether Indigenous people are culturally capable of ‘good’ governance in western terms. Blame for the failings of community and organisational governance are variously laid at the door of a perceived unchanging culture, whose values are supposedly antithetical to good governance; of leaders who are abnormally corrupt; or a culture now so dysfunctional that it is unable to deliver good governance (Hughes 2007; Vanstone 2005).

In a highly charged debate, what constitutes ‘Indigenous’ governance, ‘leadership’ and ‘community’ is also contested, and so has been problematised and closely examined by several authors in this volume.

The ICGP defines a ‘community’ as ‘a network of people and organisations linked together by a web of personal relationships, cultural and political connections and identities, networks of support, traditions and institutions, shared socioeconomic conditions, or common understandings and interests’ (Hunt and Smith 2006: 5). The concept can therefore encompass different types of ‘community’ including: a discrete geographic location; a ‘community of identity’ comprising a network of Indigenous people or organisations whose membership is based on cultural and historical affiliations, rather than geographic co-residence; a ‘community of interest’ comprising people who may not necessarily share the same world view or customs, but who share a set of common goals; and a political or policy community, such as a bureaucratic network of individuals (ibid.).

Such distinctions are useful for analytic purposes, but as the authors document here, several of these different types of community can be found in a single location. Communities are more than just residential locations or interpersonal networks. They can take on enduring social patterns, institutional voices, roles, functions, collective identities and structures.

The ‘communities’ that feature in this volume reflect much of the complexity and diversity elaborated above. In the context of governance, the concept of community immediately raises issues of scale, cultural geographies and boundaries, and contestation over those. The ICGP research therefore focused beyond the geographic boundaries of discrete communities to include the more permeable and mobile collectivities to be found dispersed across wider regions, and which are often seen by Indigenous people as constituting the more legitimate bases for the ‘self’ in their community self-governance.