This study began with quite a different research focus from that which has emerged during the course of fieldwork. As a linguistic anthropologist who had worked with Yolngu—but not with their organisations—since 1974, I was initially interested primarily in Yolngu conceptualisations of governance and how these translated into the organisational environment. I anticipated that there would be differences between Yolngu conceptualisations and those of non-Yolngu staff (see F. Morphy 2007c), and wanted to investigate how the space between these two sets of views was negotiated in the context of the organisation. Was some form of ‘cultural match’ (Cornell and Begay 2004) in place, and if not, was it attainable? Although I was conscious of something called the ‘wider governance environment’ within which the organisation sat, I did not then see it as a major focus of the research.

But it happened that my fieldwork took place during a period (2005–07) when that wider environment was undergoing a radical transformation. Early on, it became clear that the increasing pace of change in government policy and in the manner of its implementation, both at the Territory and Commonwealth levels, was putting the organisation under strain.^[25] The tension between Yolngu conceptualisations of the nature of the organisation and those of its government paymasters had reached a point where its causes had to be examined and addressed if the organisation was to survive. In effect, I was witnessing a struggle between the Yolngu ‘world’ and the state over exactly what kind of organisation Laynha is, and what it exists for.

In his introduction to Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott (1998) describes the project outlined in the epigraph to this chapter as ‘the road not taken’. He came to see efforts at sedenterisation as but one type of action in the more general project of the modern state—that of making society ‘legible’, the better to control and administer its subject-citizens. This chapter is framed partly in terms of Scott’s original, more narrowly defined research question. In the case of an Indigenous organisation whose members live ‘radically uncontained’ mobile lives (F. Morphy 2007d), but which is heavily dependent on funding from a state that has in recent years become increasingly inimical to such a lifestyle, the governance of the organisation has to be seen as the site of a political struggle—rather than merely a site of engagement—between incommensurable sets of values and objectives. In such a context, ‘good’ or ‘effective’ governance is not, as it is so often portrayed, a matter to be contemplated as if it were a politically neutral matter. The question to be asked here is: when considering the governance arrangements of an organisation like Laynha, who is this governance for, and for whose good? This is partly a question about power—how it is exercised by the powerful, and resisted, circumvented or accommodated by the relatively powerless—and partly a question about value. The focus of this chapter, then, is on the struggle over value that I witnessed, rather than on the details of Laynha’s governance arrangements per se.

Central to the question of ‘good’ governance is the notion of accountability. In this case, government, the holder of the purse strings, has much more power than the other partner in the arena—the encapsulated and locally isolated minority Indigenous population, as represented by local organisations like Laynha. Elsewhere I have argued (F. Morphy 2007c) that having a system of checks and balances—in other words a system of accountability that is bidirectional—is a universal of good governance arrangements.^[26]

Drawing on the work of O’Donnell (1999) and Schedler (1999), Schacter (2000: 1) distinguishes ‘vertical’ accountability ‘of the state to its citizens’ from ‘horizontal’ accountablility ‘by the state to its own public institutions of accountability’. He points out that:

The Howard Coalition Government, in its relationship to Australia’s Indigenous peoples, began quite early on to systematically diminish their ability to hold the government to vertical account, starting with the abolition of the national representative system embodied in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC). The attrition of horizontal accountability followed inexorably, and reached its apogee when the government gained control of the Senate in 2006. Its ‘National Emergency’ intervention into the NT and the passing of the legislation that legitimated it were the actions of an unaccountable government—it seemed to feel no need either to address the recommendations of the report^[27] that was the purported catalyst for the intervention (Behrendt 2007: 15) or to put in place measures to evaluate its effectiveness (Hinkson 2007: 2–3).