The capacity for community development to improve conditions in Australian Aboriginal communities : an anthropological analysis

Abstract

For 35 years, Aboriginal self-determination policy privileged local autonomy in the autonomy-relatedness dynamic central to Aboriginal sociality. This privileging brought a major change to Aboriginal sociality and collective identity. The self in self-determination policy had a strongly local focus through which it was thought community development would thrive. Key connected factors in the privileging of local autonomy are socio-cultural reification, juridification and entification. The reification is with respect to identity associated with land-based tradition. All three of these factors are contrary to the profound processes of relatedness in the Australian Aboriginal domain. The so-called intervention by the Commonwealth into Northern Territory Aboriginal affairs in 2007 dramatically changed the policy settings in the NT at least. But local autonomy remains privileged over relatedness. As such, this thesis argues, the foundation for an Aboriginal civil society able to negotiate the now very fluid policy environment and make the most of the opportunities presented in community development projects like the thesis case studies in fact remains generally weak. The thesis argues that recognition of relatedness is the basis of civil society in the Aboriginal domain and a key to improvements in Australian Aboriginal communities, without dismissing local autonomy. The common good inherent in community development is limited without this recognition. So is cultural match, said to be important in development project governance in the Indigenous domain. The thesis examines these matters through three case studies, community development projects that use moneys paid to Aboriginal people from the use of Aboriginal land for mining and a national park. An important finding is that autonomy-relatedness balance reflected in the governance arrangements of community development projects is needed for Aboriginal people to properly identify with the projects and thus participate meaningfully in them in order to realise tangible and sustainable community benefits from them. Meanwhile, commercial development like mining continues to favour the certainty afforded in the localising factors of reification, juridification and entification. Aboriginal self-determination has been characterised as a policy of disengagement of wider society from Aboriginal people. Consistent with this, and again contrary to relatedness, an underlying theme in the thesis is that of separation. As well as the disengagement of the policy, this separation includes the separation of some Aboriginal people from other Aboriginal people arising from locally emplaced identity, tradition from modernity and community development from economic development and the market economy. At this level, the thesis points to the importance of an intercultural approach to development entertaining the notion of hybridity including that of the hybrid economy. This is not to deny the benefits of self-determination policy over its policy predecessors, much less to suggest a return to assimilation policy in particular, but to suggest some ways to help resolve the serious problems still facing remote Aboriginal communities as well as to flag the limitations of community development in this context.