In the second phase of its policy reform agenda, the NT Government sought to reassert its own culture of governance in an attempt to contain, mould and rename Indigenous systems of governance and their attendant institutions, and in an effort to hasten the process of regionalisation. In the course of working to achieve their goal of a strong regional organisation, Bininj community organisations and their elected leaders have attempted to design elements of a new ‘culture of governance’. To do this, they have used formal and informal techniques and tools to create innovative governance institutions and structures, and imbue them with legitimacy and practical capability.

At its heart, the intercultural contest occurring within the West Arnhem initiative is over power and authority itself:

Committee members overwhelmingly see this intercultural contestation as more than just a struggle for regionalised local government. It is a process by which they hope to secure greater self-governance and control over the longer term. It remains to be seen whether regionalised local government delivers on its promises and expectations in West Arnhem. In the meantime, there is much that can be learned from the process to date.

The new NT Government policy framework states that its:

But policy implementation has been anything but orderly. This is more than simply a consequence of the real world complexities of implementation catching up with the policy vision. The local government reform process has been wracked by problems created by the institutional failings of the government’s own culture of governance, including differences of political opinion within the government and cabinet. Several NT Ministers have appeared reluctant to commit to the New Local Government policy, preferring the more flexible and culturally-inclusive approach laid out in the BSRSF.

In 2008, erratic government commitment to its own policy led to the NT Cabinet allowing non-Indigenous residents in the Litchfield region west of Darwin to opt out of regionalisation, while still requiring Indigenous residents in other regions of the NT to continue. As a consequence, some of the Indigenous communities who were told in early 2007 that they had to amalgamate into larger regions are now questioning why they should continue to be involved, or why they need to rush to meet a government-imposed deadline of the middle of 2008.^[14]

Another recent Government decision to set an unusually low cap on the rate payments from pastoralists and the mining sector caused considerable disquiet within the bureaucracy and amongst several members of the WASTC.^[15] In this highly charged environment, in mid 2008, the NT Minister responsible for oversighting the New Local Government policy and two senior departmental officers resigned. These officers were centrally involved in the West Arnhem Shire process.

The WASTC has not been surprised by the erratic governance of government, with all its policy reversals, changing implementation rules, and rapid turnover of bureaucratic faces at their meetings. The nub of contention for committee members has consistently focused on whether they actually have genuine decision making powers or not. This issue has especially arisen in the context of departmental reassertion of its decision making powers under the New Local Government policy. Consequently, implementation of that policy has been transformed and contained by its engagement with persistently asserted Indigenous governance institutions and agency.

Today, a growing number of Indigenous Australians are re-imagining what constitutes legitimate representation, decision making and leadership for their community governance arrangements. They are doing this at different societal scales and experimenting with models of governance. More specifically, the West Arnhem case study describes the ways in which principles of networked governance, nodal leadership, institutional innovation, and the cognitive tools of compartmentalisation are being used—both consciously and unconsciously—by Bininj people as interpretative instruments with which to design new governance arrangements that suit larger scale cultural geographies and retain cultural legitimacy.

Indigenous leaders play a pivotal role in mobilising deep-seated cultural understandings and imperatives in order to do this. When their transformations and experiments have resonated with their peer network of leaders and with their members (their ‘jury’), and are judged to be ‘fair’ and ‘equal’ in Indigenous terms, then the new rules and structures have gained internal legitimacy. In this way, it has been the nodal leaders and their networks who have created an internal culture of governance, but it is the ‘governed’ (the ‘jury’ of community members) who have enabled new governance institutions to be implemented and sustained.

To be imbued with legitimacy, new governance institutions have to be tested and proven useful in the real world. If new rules and ways of looking at governance prove workable and legitimate—not only in the Indigenous arena, but in the wider intercultural arena of government policy—then they may receive endorsement within the policy implementation processes. But if governance rules are imposed by external agents, or if they cannot be enforced without damaging fundamental Indigenous cultural values and ways of behaving, then those governed will inevitably deliver a verdict of failure and resist the application of the rules.

There are limits to the extent to which Indigenous Australians can currently transform and reassemble their institutions of governance. One set of constraining factors lies within Indigenous cultures of governance themselves. In West Arnhem Land, the Indigenous cultural drive towards localism and small-scale autonomy acts to impose social limits to political aggregation. When internal legitimacy and trust waver, the group to be governed tends to default back to small localised networks of close kin.

As a consequence, there can be significant difficulties in sustaining the horizontal social spread of new governance institutions. Indigenous networks—especially those of leaders—can facilitate this horizontal extension, in particular to the regional level. But transforming and deepening the legitimacy of Indigenous institutions to enable larger scale cultural geographies of governance requires time, facilitation and ongoing discussion in order to generate the wider consensus and support needed at the local levels.

New governance institutions that appear to preference the rights and interests of some groups or individuals over others, or which diminish valued group norms, do not generate sufficient cognitive or cultural traction to sustain their ordering power. Nor will they be sustained if they are unable to accommodate the layered and networked nature of power and decision making in Indigenous societies. Institution building that is based on the flexible reassembly of pre-existing Indigenous norms and ideas about what is ‘equal’, ‘proper’ and ‘fair’ appears to have greater effectiveness, both in meeting the challenge of new situations and in winning the support of the members of a community or organisation.

Another significant factor limiting Indigenous transformation of governance institutions arises from the external environment. Contemporary Indigenous governance initiatives are embedded in, not separate from, the institutions and power of the state and its culture of governance. In Australia, the state exercises overwhelming jurisdictional, institutional and financial powers through which it governs Indigenous culture and seeks to make Indigenous governance and people ‘good’ in western terms. As one member of the WASTC summarised this relative power imbalance:

But Indigenous processes of institutional transformation have the power to subvert, contain and modify the agenda of the state’s own culture of governance and its efforts to govern Indigenous culture. This partly explains why, in Australian Indigenous affairs, policy implementation inevitably becomes disorderly and uncertain, leading to processes and outcomes on the ground that are often entirely different from those originally intended. This has been the case in West Arnhem Land.

Indigenous societies do not exist frozen in time as outdated ‘cultural museums’ (cf. Vanstone 2005). They have a long history of highly sophisticated innovations in their governing institutions. Furthermore, Indigenous leaders are often adept at connecting into non-Indigenous policy, bureaucratic nodes and political networks in order to achieve their own priorities. Astute government officers who pay attention to, and build relationships of trust into, those networks are themselves better able to act as intermediaries between the two cultures of governance, and to carry out community development work to support governance initiatives at local and regional levels.

From this it is clear that in order for contemporary institutional transformation of Indigenous governance to be effective and sustainable a number of conditions must be met. First and foremost, new governance institutions must be initiated by Indigenous people themselves on the basis of their informed consent. Second, the role of trusted and respected leaders is critical to institution building. Third, it must be undertaken in ways that resonate with community members’ views of what is considered to be culturally legitimate and practically workable. Fourth, external coercion and the imposition of governance institutions have little traction in changing behaviour or building commitment and responsibility. And fifth, the facilitation and community development work of trusted government officers can make a major contribution to the implementation of enabling policies about governance.

But it appears that in these matters the state is a slow learner; or rather, in the case of West Arnhem regionalisation, its desire to retain decision making power and control appears to have inhibited its learning and outcomes. In some ways, the state has been less innovative than Bininj in designing effective institutions to carry out its governance objectives. In the end, the state seems to have failed to recognise the value and benefits of Bininj decision making, to see that Bininj leaders can resolve complex governance problems with innovative strategies, and that their solutions can actually facilitate government policy implementation. In the end, it may well be that regardless of the power differential the Bininj understanding of the state’s governance culture is greater than the state’s comprehension and control of Bininj governance culture.