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Good governance starts from the top down. |
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NIT FORUM: When will the Governance Gap be closed?
ISSUE 168 - 11 Dec 2008
ISSUE 168, December 11, 2008: Workable governance arrangements hold the key to closing the gap, writes CAEPR's JANET HUNT*.
One of the least publicised but most important points the report of Northern Territory Emergency Response review made was that 'capable and culturally legitimate' governance bodies are needed at local and regional levels. Only then can communities achieve their development goals.
The Board of Review's report briefly discussed the history of governance and leadership in NT Indigenous communities and recognised that the way the 'Intervention' had been imposed on communities "may have further undermined the already weakened and stressed systems of traditional Aboriginal authority, decision-making, leadership, community engagement and self-governance".
The Review argued that without strong local governance and leadership, communities would never be in a strong position to engage with governments and others about their own development.
Research we have been conducting over the last four years across 11 Indigenous communities, five of which are in the Northern Territory, confirms this. The Indigenous Community Governance Project, an Australian Research Council funded collaboration between the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research (CAEPR) at The Australian National University, Reconciliation Australia and a number of Indigenous community organisations, is the most comprehensive Indigenous governance research ever undertaken in Australia.
Culturally legitimate and practically effective governance lies at the heart of improved Indigenous outcomes. Indeed, 'Closing the gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia will remain a pipedream unless workable and legitimate governance arrangements are created and sustained in Aboriginal communities.
We now have robust evidence of what such governance arrangements might look like, and how they can be developed.
Our research evidence emphatically concludes that getting governance right is essential for the future of Indigenous Australia, yet time and again governments have failed to seize the opportunity.
This research, recently published in a new book, Contested Governance: Culture, power and institutions in Indigenous Australia, argues that resolving the tensions between western and Indigenous approaches to governance is an essential foundation for all other programs.
The book's title refers to the contest going on between the values and systems of Australian governments and those of Indigenous people, who struggle to carve out space for their own legitimate ways of governing at local and regional levels within the constraints imposed by the wider Australian system of democracy.
The book features case studies from remote, rural and urban areas that show how negotiated governance models, based on the informed consent and decision-making of Indigenous people, lead to improved community and economic development.
Launching Contested Governance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma said it provided an invaluable insight into the subtleties of Indigenous governance and was an excellent tool for governments, policy makers, academics and the broader community.
"The book details a number of studies of Indigenous groups successfully transforming their institutions, responding to new challenges and engaging in their own capacity building," he said.
"They, and others like them, deserve to be supported by government as a key priority."
These examples indicate that many Indigenous communities have recognised the importance of focusing on their governance, but they need access to advice and support, as well as resources, to enable them to take their ideas forward.
There also needs to be a change in the way governments govern Indigenous affairs.
Our research reveals that the 'governance of governments' is as much part of the problem as the challenges within Indigenous communities themselves.
Governments' policy, funding and program frameworks have to change to better facilitate Indigenous community governance.
If we need an intervention, it is within the governance of government.
Networked governance the key
One of our key findings is that despite the cultural diversity among Indigenous groups across Australia, there are some common principles which underpin successful Indigenous governance arrangements everywhere.
One such principle is the use of networked models of governance which encompass dispersed local groups, and connect organisations, families or clan groupings across communities and regions.
For example, there is widespread evidence of the Indigenous use of the concept of 'family' as a metaphor for developing networked governance, and for generating underlying organisational rules and cultures.
Diane Smith, a key researcher on the project, describes the establishment of Yarnteen Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders Corporation in Newcastle.
Its leadership wanted to recognise a core of family groups as the organisation's main constituency. Family representation was developed as the basis for their governing arrangements.
Over the years, as it grew and reassessed its strategic direction, Yarnteen diversified its organisational structure to respond to the need for changing economic development strategies.
It incubated several offshoot organisations to take over different parts of its functional operations.
These are all located in or around Newcastle, separately incorporated, and having their own purposes and separate boards. Yet they remain collectively known as 'the Yarnteen group' and the 'Yarnteen family'.
Through this networked organisational relationship, Yarnteen's leadership has retained a strong role in mentoring and providing management support to the incubated organisations and wider community.
Yarnteen is a highly successful economic development organisation, which among other things now runs a bulk warehousing and commodity-handling service at the Newcastle docks, a 'green' car and boat wash in Port Macquarie, an Indigenous Creative Enterprise Centre, which provides access to computers and technology for business development, and a number of affiliated organisations, among them a registered training organisation, an Indigenous employment centre and a cultural resource association.
As a result of building a strong internal culture within the organisation based on the family concept, today Yarnteen's governing members, management and staff regard the organisation as being 'one big family'.
Another aspect of this 'networked governance' is that governance is more successful where 'bottom-up' governance models - which have inter-connected layers of decision-making, roles and responsibilities - are carefully developed.
What matters for successful governance in these cases is that organisations work out through a community development process what the responsibilities of different layers will be, what roles each will take and how their accountabilities to each other will function.
This has significant implications for the development of the new Shires in the Northern Territory as well as for other regional governance arrangements being trialled elsewhere.
For example, two researchers, Will Sanders and Sarah Holcombe, worked with the former Anmatjere Community Government Council, an Aboriginal local government body centred on the small township of Ti-Tree about two hours north of Alice Springs.
It was established in 1993, at a time when the Northern Territory Government was trying to develop more regional, multi-settlement local government, rather than very small community councils.
ACGC no longer exists, having been amalgamated into the much larger Central Desert Shire from July 1 this year, but in its 15 years' existence it demonstrated some valuable principles about how localism and regionalism can co-exist and function effectively, overcoming some of the capacity constraints of a smaller body, but not overriding the autonomy which local settlements want.
The Council serviced a number of outlying settlements, some not too far from Ti-Tree, others a good distance away, and found that its legitimacy was strengthened by its ability to assist outlying communities to develop, including through the CDEP scheme, and to have a level of autonomy over their community operations, within the framework of the regional body's policies.
Getting the balance right between maintaining and strengthening local settlement community activities and the aggregation of regional interests was vital; as was getting real clarity about roles and relationships between the different layers of its operation. These are important principles for the new NT shires.
However, despite the successes which these and other stories in the book can point to, the research has revealed how difficult it is, even for the most successful Indigenous organisations and groups, to manage the vagaries of rapidly changing government policy and program funding.
For example, over several years, Bininj people of the West Arnhem region tried to assert and insert their decision-making processes, cultural geographies, and institutions into a local government regionalisation initiative which eventually had to become a shire.
They were constantly confronted by very different non-Indigenous notions of what is 'right' and 'fair'. As Diane Smith said, "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 she showed, Indigenous peoples' capacity to transform and recreate their own institutions can operate as a powerful tool to positively build governance arrangements that suit new conditions, and to modify the state's efforts to govern Indigenous culture.
Frances Morphy worked with an outstation resource agency, Laynhapuy Homelands Association Incorporated, located in East Arnhem Land, which finds itself trying to mediate between a highly structured, yet flexible Yolngu governance and social 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 created major tensions.
The NT Intervention, changes to CDEP, housing, and outstations policy and funding, and the advent of regional Shires in the NT were combining to create extraordinary uncertainty and pressure on the organisation.
Furthermore, Yolgnu conceptualisations of their own organisation, which had been established to support their homelands living, were in direct conflict with those of its government funders. The very survival of this successful organisation was at stake.
Just as in the West Arnhem story, underlying the struggles which Laynha was experiencing were different culturally-based conceptions and values of what 'good' governance looked like. Jon Altman's account of the Bawinanga Aboriginal Corporation provides another example of the same problem.
In all these cases, the key point is that both western and Indigenous systems of value are at work; each viewing the other in 'deficit' terms and so perpetuating a real obstacle to improved governance and outcomes on the ground.
Above all, resolving these tensions will require the state, as the more powerful party, to accept 'difference' in its policy and institutional thinking, rather than viewing it as a problem.
If the governance recommendations of the Report of the NTER Review are to be implemented, there is a need for governments to provide the policy space and the necessary support for the strengths of Indigenous governance to flourish - to work with the cultural basis of these societies, rather than against them and to 'close the governance gap': both their own, and that existing in Indigenous communities. The results will speak for themselves.
forum@nit.com.au
* Dr Janet Hunt is a Fellow at the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at The Australian National University.
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