The chapters in this volume speak collectively to a pluralistic understanding of governance. The relatively under-theorised nature of the concept of governance encourages the broad methodological approach researchers have adopted. Accordingly, amongst the following papers, the authors critically test the relevance of theories of transformation and transition; political economy; network theories of governance; leadership theory; intercultural theory; and interpretative policy analysis.
At the same time, an underlying concern common to all the authors is to examine Indigenous governance as a site for the unfinished business of post-colonial struggle, which constantly contests and renegotiates the balance of power and relationships between Indigenous Australians and the Australian state. Collectively, the chapters call attention to the hyper-fluidity of the current government policy and institutional conditions under which Indigenous Australians are seeking to develop their community, regional and national governance arrangements.
Another broad finding evident in this volume is the relevance of ‘culture’, both as an object of governance and as an explanatory variable for differences in the workings and effectiveness of governance regimes within Indigenous societies, and in its contested mode within the Australian state. In each chapter, different authors investigate particular dilemmas and issues that come to the fore in the everyday experience of Indigenous community and organisational governance.
We believe that the multi-disciplinary and methodologically varied research framework, when combined with a comparative exploration of common research issues, has provided a rich source of data and critical analysis from different perspectives about the same fundamental issues. As a consequence, it is possible to look at the papers overall and extrapolate a set of broader theoretical propositions about ‘governance’ (see also Kooiman 2003; Pels 1997; Stoker 1998), and ‘Indigenous governance’ in particular.
The first proposition about the governance of Indigenous communities that emerges from the collected papers is that the concept refers to a field characterised by a plurality of actors, institutions and systems, and a multiplicity of forms of action. Today these are drawn from both the public and private sector, and Indigenous societies. As several authors note, the field of governance in Australia has been significantly widened in the last 40 years through the burgeoning of Indigenous community service organisations. That sector has taken over some of the usual tasks of government in Indigenous affairs. Conversely, the increased involvement of the private and voluntary sectors, and unilateral intervention by the public sector into Indigenous organisations and community life, highlights the potentially greater role of all these external players in either facilitating or undermining local governance arrangements.
The second proposition that emerges is that culture matters for governance. By culture we mean the shared values, meanings, ways of understanding the world, and beliefs of a group that inform their everyday practice. It underpins the way Indigenous people work together in their communities and organisations, and it flows through their governance arrangements in persistent and innovative ways. It is clearly relevant both as a dimension and object of governance, and as an explanatory variable for differences in the operation and the effectiveness of governance. It is also a critical factor in the outcome of encounters between Indigenous Australians and the state.
Acknowledging the first proposition also means recognising that there are several different ‘cultures’ of governance operating within the broad field of governance in Australia. The book examines this complex diversity and the contestation that occurs over the role of ‘culture’ in governance. The research findings of several authors testify to the fact that culture cannot simply be quarantined outside of the workings of governance. Indeed, they demonstrate how it can constitute an important component of governance legitimacy and effectiveness. Overall, the papers suggest that what is required is a far more sophisticated understanding of how Indigenous peoples are inserting their culturally-based world views, values and institutions into their contemporary governance arrangements, and the ways these interact with the cultural values and institutions underlying the western systems of governance in Australia.
A crucial issue that is highlighted by the collection of papers is that the expectations and values imposed by the state for ‘good governance’ are often counterproductive to the establishment of workable forms of Indigenous governance. On the other hand, several chapters address the argument that governance should not be reduced simply to cultural relativism; there may be principles for effective governing that apply or resonate across many cultures, and several authors address these.
The third proposition about governance that emerges from the collected papers is the blurring of boundaries and responsibilities that occurs in tackling social, economic, law and order, and political issues. Given the entrenched levels of Indigenous socioeconomic disadvantage, this proposition identifies that there may be a concomitant blurring of departmental accountability for allocation of resources and for key outcomes, where governments can shift blame onto Indigenous organisations and people for their failures.
Within Indigenous communities, this proposition partly explains the institutionalised forms of competition between organisations for scarce government resources, and the pressure organisations endure due to the administrative overload of multiple program grants that are necessary for them to meet immediate community needs. These pressures are counterproductive to organisations taking on more strategic governance roles.
The fourth proposition about governance identifies the power dependence and inequalities involved in the relationship between the institutions of the state on the one hand, and those of Indigenous Australia on the other. This proposition acknowledges that governance is inseparable from the contestation, negotiation and construction of political identity and the exercise of institutional power; that is, who gets to decide the rules and make the decisions about important matters. In an intercultural milieu, it highlights the fact that governance is also about the politics of cultural identities.
This proposition also identifies a major challenge currently confronting Indigenous Australians: can their culturally-based predeliction for small-scale, local autonomy be sustained in the context of living in contemporary Australia, where not only governments but also some Indigenous leaders and organisations are contemplating other scales of cultural geography for Indigenous governance?
The fifth proposition highlighted by the papers is about the inter-connectedness and autonomy of self-governing networks of actors, and communities of identity and interest. Here, governance describes the interaction of self-organising networks. This proposition suggests that the institutions of governmentality are now dispersed beyond governments to the private, voluntary and Indigenous sectors, which have their own forms of authority and rules. These sectors form networks with more and less enduring features and alignments of cultural values.
This proposition suggests that governance is always an interactive process—it is about relationships; a point noted by all the papers in this volume. Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance networks are inter-linked. Several authors in the volume investigate how Indigenous actors come to form networks, what holds them together, how they maintain identity, how they mobilise resources, what determines their choices, and how they influence their joint governing decisions. They document the anticipated problems of scale and autonomy emerging, as Indigenous networks and communities struggle to develop and maintain effective governing capacity and deliver outcomes. They also examine the nature and extent of the interaction between Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance networks, and the degree of their mutual commensurability.
The final theoretical proposition emerging from the collected papers is that governance recognises that the legitimacy and capacity to get things done does not rest alone on the power of government to command or use its authority. This proposition suggests that Indigenous governance poses a challenge to the authority of the state, and to its capacity to facilitate (rather than unilaterally impose) governance institutions and effectiveness.
A dilemma documented by the papers is the issue of the inertia or self-interest of policy makers (and departments) who seek to maintain policy and implementation choices that prove counterproductive to the achievement of effective, legitimate Indigenous governance. But a related dilemma is where Indigenous leaders and organisations also resist internal governance reform because it erodes their power base. This proposition implies that governance capacity and legitimacy are, first and foremost, internal matters for the members of the Indigenous group or community concerned, and can only be enduringly transformed by them.
These theoretical propositions arising from the collective analyses presented in the following chapters are inter-related. They demonstrate that ‘governance’ is at times an analytical, at times a normative, concept; at other times it defines a specific policy, system, process, structure or political environment. All these meanings of governance are the product of cultural values, norms, institutions, behaviours and motivations.
The chapters in this volume are clustered according to these common themes and issues, which have determined the five sections of the book.
Part One sets the scene, both in terms of the policy environment and the research challenge. Janet Hunt outlines the recent history of the Australian Government’s policy frameworks for Indigenous affairs. The period during which the ICGP was being undertaken witnessed a large shift away from self-determination and acceptance of the rights of Indigenous people in Australia—a process experienced by all of the communities in which the authors worked. Some representative Indigenous organisations were dismantled by the Australian state; other organisations collapsed or struggled in the face of the overload attached to the dramatic policy changes of the past decade. She argues that resilient Indigenous governance structures and reinvigorated networks of mutual support might provide the basis for Indigenous people to regain some momentum for self-determination.
At the same time, Hunt highlights the need for governments to reform their own internal institutional arrangements. She exposes several key areas of policy and funding where this might be undertaken, and which would significantly improve both the quality of services due to all Indigenous people as citizens, and the scope for their legitimate exercise of self-determination.
Sarah Holcombe illustrates some of the dilemmas and challenges of undertaking research in the intercultural arena of Indigenous community governance. She examines what happened to the knowledge produced by the researchers in one location, Ti Tree in the NT, and demonstrates how, through the course of the research, power relationships between Indigenous people and the state—as well as relationships within their own council—were slowly revealed and activated.
Holcombe’s chapter also sheds light on what ‘policy’ is, and how it is promulgated and rationalised. She challenges the concept of ‘equity’ in service provision, and raises questions about ideas of Aboriginal choice and demand-driven development. The impact of a multitude of different players with an interest in the situation of some 100 Aboriginal people camping on unserviced land close to the Ti Tree township is highlighted. Holcombe thus shows the governance complexities and the blurring of responsibilities that are inherent in resolving many of the entrenched socioeconomic problems experienced by Indigenous Australia.
In Part Two of the book, Diane Smith, Frances Morphy and Ben Smith directly examine issues of culture and power inequalities in the operation of Indigenous governance. The papers foreground the issues of different cultural assumptions and ways of doing things, and how the complex ‘field of governance’ in which Indigenous communities and organisations operate influences their governance decision making, systems of representation, legitimacy and effectiveness.
Diane Smith’s study (Chapter 4) of the processes of regionalising governance in West Arnhem Land in the NT highlights the continuing assertion of state power through both the minutiae of policy implementation processes and bureaucratic institutions. She describes Indigenous efforts to negotiate space within these processes, in order to reassert their own governance values and institutions. She introduces the concepts of ‘cultures of governance’ and the ‘governance of culture’ to elucidate the nature of the interaction and contestation between Indigenous community leaders and organisations, and the state.
Over several years, the Bininj people have tried to assert and insert their decision-making processes, cultural geographies and institutions into a government-initiated regionalisation of local government. In doing so, they have been confronted by non-Indigenous notions of what is ‘right’, legitimate and ‘fair’. As Smith observes: ‘the Australian state exercises overwhelming legal, policy and financial powers to govern Indigenous culture, and through that power seeks to make Indigenous governance and people “good” in western terms’. However, as Smith demonstrates, Indigenous peoples’ capacity to transform and recreate their own institutions can also operate as a powerful tool, not only to positively build governance institutions that suit new conditions, but also to modify the state’s efforts to govern Indigenous culture.
Frances Morphy’s study describes an outstation resource agency, Laynhapuy Homelands Association Incorporated (Laynha), located in northeast Arnhem Land, which finds itself at the centre of an intercultural process: attempting to mediate between a highly structured, yet flexible Yolngu system and the world of the encapsulating settler state. Over the period of her case study research, the impact of government policies on the organisation has created major tensions. Yolgnu conceptualisations of their own organisation and those of its government funders have come into direct conflict, and the very survival of the organisation has been at stake.
Just as in the West Arnhem case described by Smith, underlying the struggles that Laynha is experiencing are different culturally based conceptions and values of what ‘good’ governance looks like. Morphy recognises that the state and Yolngu have to recognise that both systems of value are at play and are complex, and both have to get beyond a simple deficit view of each other. Above all, resolving the tensions will require the state, as the more powerful party, to accept cultural difference and diversity into its policy and institutional thinking, rather than viewing it as a problem. This implies the need for governments to negotiate strategies that will work across the systems of Indigenous and non-Indigenous governance, to achieve mutually agreed outcomes.
Ben Smith provides a detailed account of the efforts of Kaanju people of the upper Wenlock and Pascoe River regions in Cape York to establish outstations on their traditional country, a process which again testifies to the complex field of governance in which Indigenous and non-Indigenous aspects of governance are irrevocably intertwined. Contemporary Kaanju identities and interests are now intercultural.
The interaction between local Indigenous interests and those outside the region produces, he argues, three key tensions: between the homelands-based, and other sub-regional and regional Aboriginal organisations; between contemporary Indigenous law and custom and ‘mainstream’ governance systems; and between different articulations of Indigenous identity at various scales. But for Smith the distinction between the Indigenous domain and the Australian ‘mainstream’ fails to provide a full account of the contemporary dynamics of the governance field. Thus, conflicts over appropriate governance are conflicts about interconnected institutions at a variety of scales and with diverse mandates. ‘Cultural match’, the idea of matching an institution to an underlying social order, is similarly problematised. Smith envisages it as a complex, contested institutional field in which Indigenous organisations extend the realm of Indigenous politics and assert differing Indigenous identities.
In Part Three, Jon Altman and Diane Smith focus on the Indigenous design, form and role of institutions of governance, and the challenges these pose for both indigenous leaders, communities and their organisations, and for governments. Bill Ivory explores similar themes through an investigation of the concept of Indigenous leadership; an often poorly understood institution of Indigenous governance systems.
Jon Altman examines how the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation (BAC), in the township of Maningrida in the NT, has managed similar governance tensions as those described by Diane Smith and Frances Morphy, and how over the almost 30 years of its existence it has grown considerably and transformed its roles. The BAC now services the social and economic interests of an extremely diverse population, including widely dispersed outstation communities.
Altman emphasises the intercultural checks and balances that lie at the heart of BAC’s ability to straddle both the Indigenous and western worlds. He identifies factors that have been instrumental to the organisation’s resilience over periods of external and internal change, including the carefully negotiated balance of power amongst the local Indigenous leadership; the role of long standing non-Indigenous senior staff in attempting to balance the organisation’s customary and community obligations with legal compliance and business goals; and efforts to build informal institutions that foster openness and transparency. Despite recent threats to its major programs, Altman concludes that BAC’s continuing success can be attributed to its ability to evolve into an intercultural organisation which supports hybrid local economies and enables residential mobility between the outstations and township.
Diane Smith’s study of a dramatically different context in urban Newcastle, Yarnteen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Corporation, provides another governance and economic success story. In this chapter, Smith poses the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘family’ as issues for Indigenous governance, especially in the context of economic development initiatives. She explores the current myths and negative assumptions held about these two concepts, and the ways in which they are variously cast as either antithetical or fundamental to ‘good’ Indigenous governance and economic success. Smith describes how Yarnteen’s leaders have attempted to address these expectations and assumptions in order to develop a robust, evolving governance model that supports both its enterprise and community development goals.
Smith argues that integral to the organisation’s acknowledged success in business is the critical role of its formal and informal institutions of governance, and the ways these have been deliberately embedded in Yarnteen’s modus operandi. The organisation’s governance institutions create a system of incentives, constraints, limits and processes that direct the board, senior management and individual staff members to behave and perform in particular ways. For Yarnteen, these institutions are a form of capital—governance capital—to which there is a distinctly Indigenous character.
In the final chapter of this section, Bill Ivory (Chapter 9) explores the particular institution of men’s leadership in the Port Keats region of the NT. He analyses the governance and leadership histories of the Indigenous clans over their contact history, up to their recent establishment of a new regional governance structure based on a revitalisation of their traditional concept of thamarrurr. At different points in their governance history, clan leaders have attempted to create a ‘responsive engagement’ with the sequence of outsiders who have generated massive changes in their society.
Ivory traces the leadership development of different generations through personal and group case studies, and concludes that leadership operates in a ‘flexible field of authority’ centred on relatively fluid networks in which leaders operate as core nodes. These nodal leadership networks serve to satisfy the duality of a simultaneously egalitarian and hierarchical society. However, the networked leadership model has been barely perceived or understood by those outside it, much less engaged with. Ivory echoes Morphy’s plea for a mutual appreciation of the systemic differences as a basis for moving forward. He emphasises the contemporary significance of the clan unit and the concept of thamarrurr, the enduring way that clans cooperate together, and the positive ongoing role of the local world view within their governance system.
In Part Four, papers by Will Sanders and Manuhuia Barcham focus on the cultural geographies of Indigenous governance—its changing scales, sociology and boundaries—and the contestation and negotiation that occurs within and between Indigenous communities and governments around definitions of the collective ‘self’ in governance arrangements. The challenge of developing larger, regional aggregations that have legitimacy and respect local autonomy, but which also generate greater capacity to achieve Indigenous goals, is the issue these chapters address. Traditionally, Indigenous governance has been highly localised and small scale, but with groups linked into ever-widening relationships and shared decision making. These pose the potential for larger scale, bottom-up alliances and confederations.
In Chapter 10, Manuhuia Barcham traces the story behind the development of the successful Noongar native title claim over the Perth Metropolitan area; the first of six claims over southwest Western Australia (WA). After several false starts and seemingly interminable and debilitating problems of governance, Noongar people eventually developed a process and structure to articulate and progress their aspirations in the southwest.
Finding the right organisational and decision-making structure to represent their diverse interests was critical. The South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council (SWALSC) achieved it. A process of detailed and lengthy genealogical work using participatory family research provided the basis for a family based representative structure for native title working parties and claimant groups. This was widely perceived to be legitimate and effective. SWALSC’s experience indicates that aggregation of Indigenous interests beyond the local is possible if approached in a culturally legitimate and inclusive way.
Will Sanders explores how the Anmatjere Community Government Council (ACGC) has managed the tensions between regionalism and local autonomy in Central Australia over the past 15 years. The ACGC operated with a form of ‘regional federalism’, which had demanding quorum rules that became unworkable and were eventually reformed. But its success in supporting what Sanders describes as ‘dispersed single settlement localism’, while still managing its regional mandate, provides another illustration of how regionalism and localism can coexist successfully as a governance model; a conclusion that mirrors Diane Smith’s analysis from West Arnhem Land.
In Part Five, papers by Christina Lange and Kathryn Thorburn examine two very different contexts in WA, where Indigenous groups are attempting to rebuild their governance arrangements and develop locally relevant governance capacities. These papers focus on how organisations and those who support them work to strengthen their governance in contexts where problems have been identified by external government agents who then take various kinds of action.
Christina Lange describes how the governance of Windidda Station, a pastoral lease owned by the Windidda Aboriginal Corporation (WAC) in the Shire of Wiluna, came to public attention through a complaint alleging neglect of cattle during the 2005 drought. At risk was the organisation’s major asset, its pastoral lease. Contemporaneously, an investigation by the Registrar of Aboriginal Corporations demanded compliance with numerous conditions if WAC was to retain its registration. As Lange notes: ‘Over an 18 month period the organisation had to deal with a barrage of bureaucratic and legislative challenges.’ Power inequalities and misunderstanding of governance roles and responsibilities came to the fore.
However, the community had networks of support that it was able to call upon. These assisted it to confront and overcome its governance and management problems. Capacity building support of various kinds, including support from Lange herself, enabled the organisation to regain control of its pastoral lease, develop a plan for the pastoral business, and build the governance skills of its members. Importantly, in this process, governance came to be seen as a tool to enable the community to achieve its aspirations, rather than simply a compliance matter—an important lesson for strengthening self-governance.
Kathryn Thorburn analyses a different type of intervention; namely, a governance review exercise undertaken by a remote Aboriginal organisation in the West Kimberley region, which was experiencing some governance problems and thereby drawing unfavourable government scrutiny. Her study exposes the very different perceptions of the organisation: those held by the key government funding agency; the internal differences of views about what ‘governance’ might mean among the members of the organisation; and the views of its coordinator. The external consultant engaged to lead the review identified major cross cultural misunderstandings as factors contributing to the stresses being experienced by the organisation.
As with Ivory’s chapter, Thorburn demonstrates that the history of the organisation and its community members are powerful factors shaping the extent of its Indigenous legitimacy and the ongoing tensions within it. Furthermore, the coordinator was clearly caught between two increasingly incompatible forms of bureaucratic demands and Indigenous expectations. The review itself, as a one-off exercise, was able to identify many of the underlying problems. But whilst ‘governance’ language opened up space for problems to be better understood, the time allocated to the review and the lack of follow-up, meant that the specifics revealed went largely unresolved. The timeframes for capacity building interventions clearly need to be longer.