BAC is a distinctive form of organisation that is intercultural: its organisational governance has to accommodate both western legal requirements and Indigenous social norms and external and internal accountability. In BAC’s case, this governance interculturality is further complicated by the scale of the organisation, its history and its transformations over time, from a focused ORA to a mixed and more diverse organisation that also operates as a CDEP organisation and development agency. These complexities are further complicated again by the extraordinary cultural and linguistic diversity of its Indigenous constituency, by differences between the needs and aspirations of members who reside in town and country, and by long-standing territorial disputes (some of which had their genesis in the 1970s) with other Maningrida organisations. Many of these governance challenges and tensions are not unique to BAC. In this section, I focus on just a few of a myriad of governance challenges that BAC faces.

A first-order issue for BAC is the challenges that its all-Aboriginal executive face. This executive is elected by secret ballot at the annual general meeting, with the chairman being the nominated candidate who attracts the most votes. There is invariably a change of chairman from one year to the next and regular turnover in the composition of the executive. This makes executive decision making—which varies from the mundane to the multi-million dollar—difficult. This diversity of business is not unusual for committee-run organisations. For example, the executive has to be heavily involved in setting rules for CDEP, the dominant every day business, as well as in making investment decisions in relation to enterprises, and decisions about forms of new grant funding to be sought and new projects to pursue.

Two key challenges emerge here. First, the level of expertise needed to understand and oversee the operations of this complex conglomerate (see Fig. 7.2) is significant. In a community like Maningrida there is a relatively small pool of Aboriginal people who have the requisite educational qualifications and understanding of business and corporate governance to undertake this task. Arguably, this is an indictment of the Maningrida education system, but also of the lack of opportunity for on-the-job education and training at BAC given its organisational longevity. The few who have such skills face pressures to participate on other boards, placing them in actual or potential conflict of interest and under considerable workload pressures. As BAC’s constitution requires an annual spill of executive positions, it is unusual for any executive members to be consistently re-elected. This, as noted later, reflects the aspirations of members to share both the benefits and responsibilities of office among numerous regional interest groups. Consequently, new executive members need to be familiarised with corporate decision making processes on an annual basis and there is limited growth of capacity and ongoing executive expertise over time. Board training and induction takes time and the legal requirements facing members are onerous.

This in turn means that senior management has far greater knowledge about the running of BAC than the executive. In BAC’s case, the divergence between the Aboriginal executive and the non-Aboriginal management expertise has been exacerbated by high turnover of executive membership and low turnover of senior management: BAC has only had three chief executive officers since 1979. Historically, this has resulted in a degree of executive apathy in actively engaging in organisational governance and BAC being vulnerable to the external perception that it is only governed by senior management rather than the Aboriginal executive. BAC’s organisational complexity and the past reluctance of the executive to be actively involved in governance also pose a major challenge to management in finding the right balance between executive and member consultation, and a focus on implementation and action. In the past this resulted in too much governance by management, something that is in the process of changing.

BAC is incorporated under Australian law and so has requirements to comply with western, formal modes of governance as set out in incorporations statute. As a general rule, incorporations law requires that members of the executive operate impartially without vested interest and to meet the objectives of the corporation for the benefit of its membership. Gerritsen and Straton (2007: 166) refer to this western incorporations requirement as a ‘weberian rationality of impersonal distribution’. Such modes of governance are very different from Aboriginal modes of governance that prioritise kin-based obligations and sectional interests. In the BAC case, these sectional interests are diverse and fluid, comprising members of one’s household or extended kinship group, or members of one’s language community or totemic cluster, or outstation co-residents. Aboriginal social norms see pressure continually applied to executive members to respond to demands of particular sectional interests.

There is an ongoing tension between senior managers, who more readily ascribe to western modes of governance and are highly aware of external accountability requirements, and Aboriginal executive members, who have variable understandings of external accountability, but are acutely aware and constantly reminded of internal accountability to the sectional interests and the Aboriginal priorities that they represent. Finding the right balance between corporate compliance and appropriate responsiveness to member priorities is a continual governance challenge. This challenge is exacerbated if non-Indigenous staff do not understand Indigenous kin-based social norms and fundamentally appreciate the nature of Aboriginal connections to, and responsibilities for, country.^[4] Choosing which governance approach to emphasise implicates a process that Bagshaw (1977: 27) referred to as ‘jural selectivity’. While BAC’s objects are broadly defined to allow compliance with Aboriginal priorities, like ceremonial participation, there is an ongoing tension in making the resource allocation between competing priorities, while complying with external bureaucratic and internal membership accountability.

Within BAC’s membership and generally within the elected executive, there is a mix of elites: those who enjoy status on the basis of Aboriginal customary criteria and those who gain status on the basis of western knowledge, Bagshaw’s ‘balanda marringi’. The poor outcomes from the Maningrida education system mean that there are relatively few with the requisite English literacy to be members of the neo-elite. While this relatively small cadre is now actively involved in organisational governance, as noted above a number are simultaneously members of several Maningrida-based (and external) organisations. Historically, BAC has under-invested in corporate governance training for its executive, in part because of high executive turnover and in part because suitable governance training has not been locally available. This in turn resulted in member apathy and disinterest in what was often (erroneously) viewed as ‘balanda business’, because of the way the organisation had been structured and run in the past.

Invariably, the BAC executive includes a mix of the customary elite and the more western-familiar neo-elite. Informal processes see cross-cultural tensions between western and Indigenous modes of governance being constantly played out, often in executive committee meetings or in the less formal ‘smoko room’ context described earlier. Western modes of governance require strict adherence to corporations law and external accountability, at least in principle.^[5] The BAC executive neo-elites partially understand this, while Indigenous modes of governance require accountability to immediate family, broader kinship networks, language communities, ritual allies, co-residents and a myriad of other obligations with which executive members are encumbered. On occasion, an executive member belongs to both elites, and on other occasions elites and neo-elites form alliances in executive decision making.^[6]

Organisational metamorphosis has presented BAC with new governance challenges. BAC’s original raison d’etre was as an outstations support agency, but as noted elsewhere (Altman and Johnson 2000), its success first as a CDEP organisation and then as a development agency has provided more and more employment opportunities to its membership in Maningrida. Five-yearly census data indicate some drift of outstation residents into Maningrida over time, and while the reasons for this re-centralisation are complex, BAC’s success is certainly one contributing factor.

This in turn has generated a new set of governance challenges. For example, BAC increasingly needs to maintain good patronage relations with the Dukurrdji traditional owners of Maningrida on whose lands its growing numbers of enterprises are located. This challenge has been addressed by the payment of lease rentals. Ultimately, BAC’s success may offer too much opportunity for its membership in Maningrida (where all enterprises are located) rather than in the bush—a centralisation chain in-migration may result as kinship and sociality draw in the relatives of those finding opportunity in town. The logical consequence of this process is the abandonment and undermining of the culturally differentiated outstation communities in favour of a single culturally homogeneous (in relative terms) Maningrida population, whose younger members will become increasingly attenuated from their own lands and traditions. This will increasingly require BAC members to have multiple allegiances to both BAC and other Maningrida organisations that provide housing and other services. This creates challenges, as such multiple allegiances, mixed with notions of egalitarianism and risk minimisation, can create some ambivalence about BAC’s regional dominance. In interview, two members of multiple boards emphasised to me that they did not want BAC to get ‘too big’. It is also contrary to the original aims of the outstations movement.

From the outstations perspective, BAC has clearly become less of a resource agency, although it remains supportive of outstation needs. Outstation residents for their part have loosened their identity links with BAC alone and now also patronise other Maningrida organisations. The issue of servicing outstations in the Maningrida region is becoming increasingly complex, especially in the context of discussions about the amalgamation of townships and outstations into regional authority ‘shires’ (see D. Smith this volume, Chapter 4), and the proposed withdrawal of Commonwealth support of outstations from 1 July 2008. Any potential to resolve such issues appears to have been placed in temporary abeyance by the unfolding of dramatic ‘national emergency’ policy events in June 2007 discussed further below.