Table of Contents
In recent decades, the debate over mining development and Indigenous peoples has broadened, both geographically and thematically. The resistance paradigm that asserts the rights of communities against a new industrialised wave of dispossession has been sustained and applied to a succession of new case studies (Cultural Survival 2001; Downing et al. 2003; Hyndman 1994; Lane and Chase 1996; Roberts 1978). Alongside that, and especially in developed countries such as Australia and Canada, attention has shifted to work within a paradigm of engagement, negotiation and management (Howitt 2001: 208–65; Render 2005; Vachon and Toyne 1983). Much discussion now revolves around the achievement of best-practice processes to maximise the short and long-term benefits that mining can offer, and mitigate or compensate for the problems it causes (Hill 1999; Indigenous Support Services and ACIL Consulting (ISS/ACIL) 2001; O’Faircheallaigh 1996, 2003b; Sosa and Keenan 2001).
The most widely recognised benefit is the direct injection of earned income into the Indigenous domain, either by employment of Indigenous people in the mining operation or support for Indigenous businesses created to service the project (Cousins and Nieuwenhuysen 1984). A problem affecting both these economic inflows is their long-term sustainability, especially in the local area. Once the mining operation ceases, Aboriginal employees with skills and experience may be faced with a choice of returning to an environment of unemployment or underemployment, or moving to areas with an active job market. Similarly, businesses may have to fold or seek custom elsewhere.
A more indirect way in which mining companies have sought to transfer benefits to Indigenous communities is through the funding of local organisations which apply the received resources to various programs of their own design. In some cases these organisations’ revenues will come in part from their role as business operators and thus face the same risk of mine closure. More importantly, however, mining agreements can direct substantial revenue flows, in the form of entitlements to an agreed percentage of mine income, to local organisations, allowing or even requiring them to accumulate capital funds over which they exercise long-term trusteeship. This is an important but under-utilised way in which mining companies can contribute to the preconditions for long-term remote-area Indigenous development that is not ancillary to the mining operation itself.
Aboriginal organisations funded from mining revenue sit at the intersection of two policy discourses in Australia. The first is that adverted to already: that carried on within and around the mining industry itself about benefit packages for communities affected by mining operations. While also part of an ongoing national and international debate over social justice towards Indigenous people, this concern is internally motivated by increasing corporate recognition of the business case for preserving a social license to operate in remote areas where the population is often predominantly Indigenous. The second is the ongoing discourse around national policy in the area of Indigenous affairs. Within the paradigm of self-determination that had currency at the Federal level from the 1970s to the 1990s, Aboriginal organisations were strategically central. During those years also, the issue of the social license to operate came to the attention of some mining companies operating in Australia, so that the emerging industry attitude began to align with the national policy attitude. State government recalcitrance, especially in Queensland and Western Australia, and industry reaction, especially from the peak Australian Mining Industry Council (now Minerals Council of Australia), meant that this was never a uniform trend on either side. Moreover, the most recent phase of Federal Aboriginal policy-making[1] has substantially abandoned the self-determination paradigm. Nevertheless the recognition of a form of native title in Australian law and a growing trend towards agreement-making have developed to sustain and expand the niches occupied by local Indigenous organisations, and the industry’s preparedness to acknowledge their standing.
The purpose of this chapter is to consider Aboriginal organisations in their intended role as agents of development. It aims to identify a set of structural conditions under which they operate and which bear upon their capacity to implement development. My focus here thus falls within the paradigm of ‘capacity building’ that has attracted recent attention (Commonwealth of Australia 2004: 111–65). It is distinct from the common emphasis upon operational deficits in matters such as skills, knowledge and leadership suffered by many Indigenous organisations, but it does relate, especially in one of the later sections, to questions of governance. While the primary concern, consistent with the theme of this volume, is those organisations funded by mining revenue, they make up a small sub-set of Aboriginal organisations in Australia, and share the same general policy origins as the others. Thus, much of the following discussion has a wider focus. However, while the structural conditions that I identify are not unique to mining-funded organisations, I argue that several factors, including recent changes in the Indigenous affairs policy environment, cause these conditions to impinge upon such organisations in particular ways. Depending on what share of their total resources are accounted for by mining, this has implications for their capacity to define a developmental path on behalf of their constituents.
After looking in the next section at the emergence of Aboriginal organisations in policy history, I discuss four structural conditions affecting their capacity to effect developmental change on behalf of an Aboriginal constituency. Central to this analysis is Charles Rowley’s conceptualisation of Aboriginal organisations as a carapace. As such, they are simultaneously a transactional boundary and a point of articulation between external agencies and an Aboriginal domain. The structural conditions that I identify bear principally on these qualities. The first is the level of political authority at which the organisation articulates with its resource providers in the wider society, usually a state agency, sometimes a mining company. The second is the manner in which resources are transferred across that point of articulation into the jurisdiction of the Aboriginal organisation. The third is the availability of alternative sources of servicing and supply, independent of the organisation, to which its members or clientele may have resort. The fourth is the endogenous relationship between the organisation and the Aboriginal domain that it exists to service and/or represent. I then consider the particular position of organisations receiving funding from mining agreements with respect to these structural conditions. In the penultimate section, I discuss a central developmental function incumbent upon organisations located at this resourcing interface.
The idea of corporatising the Aboriginal interest emerged from the progressive political thinking of the 1960s. Those corporate entities became a critical instrument through which the new policy paradigm of self-determination was to operate. Rowley, and like thinkers such as Strehlow (n.d.: 19–24) and Coombs (Rowse 2000a), argued for respecting the integrative values of the Aboriginal social group, and allowing room for Aboriginal group choice in implementing social change. They saw the Aboriginal domain as a basis for new forms of planning and action, as ‘an opportunity for some real political science, ... for some real government’ (Rowley 1966: 236). Rowley and Coombs wanted to admit the Aboriginal group as an agent of development, given an expanded conception of what development might mean. So the design of suitable forms of Aboriginal organisation and the fostering of an Indigenous leadership were strategically central to these policy reformers (Rowse 2000a: 31–3).
This was a decisive step in the field of Aboriginal development. Prior to this, Aborigines figured as welfare recipients or units of labour. Even where congregated as ‘communities’ on reserves, settlements and missions, Aborigines participated in the developmental programs of the assimilation era mainly as workers in internal servicing and primary production jobs, making sure that the structures of dependency were at least functional. The creation in the 1970s of Aboriginal councils and servicing agencies, and their recognition as an entry point for government moneys payable to those settlements, were intended to promote the conditions for self-determined development, that is, the endogenous determination of the future of those places as Aboriginal.
Self-determination thinking was open to the spread of such arrangements throughout Aboriginal Australia for almost any purpose relevant to local needs (Anderson 2004: 260; Commonwealth of Australia 2004: 111–12; Rowley 1972: 439–41). They were adopted even where Aborigines lived among whites, and the physical separateness characteristic of remote communities was absent. The adoption of the legally incorporated form across all areas of Aboriginal interest proceeded apace, so that from the mid-1970s many thousands of associations, services, centres, councils and corporations were registered under either the Commonwealth’s Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976,[2] or corresponding State and Territory legislation. Rowse has written about this explosion of Aboriginal organisations across Australia as a central manifestation of the shift from assimilation to self-determination (Rowse 2000b: 1515–16; 2005: 214–19).
That policy step has consequently had major ramifications in the structuring of resource flows and political activity in all Aboriginal domains. The ‘community’, given legal personality by organisation into corporate forms, was deemed to be the initiator of development. From the perspective of the state, Aboriginal organisations were each a carapace beneath which the business of development could be allowed to proceed. These Indigenous legal entities thus carried the weight of the state’s expectations that it could fund self-determining Aborigines to deliver development (see Batty 2005).
The two terms, domain and carapace, require comment. In his discussion of the concept of the Aboriginal domain, Rowse (1992: 19–21) substantiates it primarily in terms of content: Aboriginal people, using Aboriginal languages, organising themselves according to Aboriginal values for the pursuit of Aboriginal priorities. He also adverts to a criterion of size, but does not insist upon it, noting that some writers have applied the term to Aboriginal fields much smaller than, for example, the west Arnhem regional domain described by von Sturmer. Indeed Rowse distinguishes domain from ‘enclave’, a term he prefers to apply to such larger regions. The large-scale mining projects considered in this volume occur in regions where many Aboriginal people live in discrete settlements that would satisfy such a macro conception of the Aboriginal domain. Others, however, live in towns among white neighbours. Like Rowse, therefore, I do not wish to impose any requirement of size. Any arena in which affairs are consistently conducted in an Aboriginal idiom and informed by Aboriginal meanings, such that Aboriginal people expect such a mode of behaviour to occur there, is an instance of the Aboriginal domain.
In the last two decades, the concept of domain has been overtaken by new modes of conceptualising relations between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous in Australia (Hinkson and Smith 2005). I retain the concept here because it was central to the model of incorporation by which Rowley and his colleagues thought self-determination could be activated. Domain and carapace were the two structural halves of that model. In this chapter, inquiring into the activation of that model in the context of development, I want to ask how those constituent concepts fare in the face of what I argue to be the structural preconditions of such a role. In other words, we can judge the adaptability and durability of Rowley’s conception by seeing how well it has meshed with those preconditions. Indeed, in such an analytical context, the concept of domain remains, in my view, a necessary tool for considering relations of articulation between collectivities. Moreover, the ethnographically minimal conception of domain being proposed here implies none of the hermetic or endogenously self-reproducing characteristics that have been the main cause for criticism of the concept.
Rowley (1972: 423, 429) conceived of the Aboriginal organisation as a carapace in the sense of a protective cover for the localised Aboriginal domain. My use here of the concept of carapace does not depend on the relationship between organisation and domain taking any particular ethnographic form, but rather arises from the positioning (and self-positioning) of organisations within policy. Later discussion will refigure the carapace as often more partial and fragmented than allowed by the initial vision of policy planners and intellectuals.
Viewed from the outside, it is clear that limitations upon the capacity of Aboriginal organisations to facilitate the self-determined development expected of them are implicit in the niche that has been created for them in public Aboriginal affairs. Historically, colonialism forged relations of articulation that now make Aboriginal society everywhere a part-society. To borrow a metaphor once prominent in anthropological theory, responsibility for the social reproduction of Aboriginal society is therefore nowhere located entirely within an Aboriginal social universe. It always draws to some extent on external sources of supply that are under non-Aboriginal control. This is so even in those remote areas where Indigenous domains are more socially self-contained. As discussed above, Aboriginal organisations are themselves an artefact of a particular moment in the policy management of those relations of articulation. They occupy niches created when the state decided that the points of articulation between Australian society and the various manifestations of Aboriginal part-societies that it encapsulates, should be made more permeable to Aboriginal participation and receptive to Aboriginal concerns. There they proliferated to a collective position of prominence.
As carapace, the Aboriginal organisation is an institution that creates a formal transactional boundary for certain purposes between its membership or clientele and the outside world. It is at the same time a conduit for external resources flowing into the Aboriginal domain. In the discussion that follows I want to look at that articulatory role and what it implies for Aboriginal development. The institutional boundary just referred to was seen to be essential if the development enabled by incoming resources was to be self-determined. The policy function of the organisational carapace as a point of articulation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal domains is thus central for realising self-determined development. There are at least two other structural conditions, however, that affect its potency in that respect. The first is the political level at which the point of articulation is established, and the second is the mode of transfer of resources from the non-Aboriginal domain.