18 Governance in projects

One of the significant factors to emerge from the consultations in Austrlia over improving land management, has been the greater understanding of consultation techniques. Our Knowledge, Our Way in Caring for Country provides a resource for ongoing projects with community:

Available from https://www.csiro.au/ourknowledgeourway. Licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

To run First Nations projects with community, we need to work with the existing organisations and the local people of the area where we work. In terms of engagement with community there are two important groups:

1. Local Aboriginal Lands Council

There is funding for Aboriginal people to support their communities through the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983. This is distributed through the about 120 Local Aboriginal Lands Councils (LALCs). These are elected representatives for Aboriginal people in their region.

These Councils manage the finances to support all Aboriginal people in their area, not just those who are traditionally from that area. The services they manage include housing, legal affairs, employment, training and property acquisition and management.

2. Reconciliation Australia

Reconciliation Australia was established in 2001 and is the lead body for reconciliation in the nation. They are an independent not-for-profit organisation that promotes and facilitates reconciliation by building relationships, respect and trust between the wider Australian community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples

There are many local Reconciliation groups that provide links between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. They are also a good point of contact with community people.

History of Governance

Governance styles

If the Voice were to be set up in Australia, it would be the first government funded participatory democracy organisation in Australia. The Voice was designed with layers of representation from local, to regional to national, where any national representative also attends, report to, and listens to, their regional and local groups.

Aboriginal  culture has always been participatory. The elders that meet to organise the corroborees are a group of people with vastly different expertise (totems) who decide on a common path forward in caring for country, that enabled all animals, birds, plants and resources to flourish in balance.

In European society the notion that those affected by legislation should be involved in the drawing up of that legislation has been slow to grow. As a result we see repeated policies and platforms overturned as unworkable and not good for most. In software development the grown of participatory research arose from the realisation that the software being developed by those who know the technology did not suit those who merely used it. Hence more had to be done to engage the users, right from the initial design.

This approach is being taken up in architecture, and the growth of tools for online sharing of designs and gathering and analysing feedback are flourishing. We need to manage users expectations, not by negating them, but showing users what is possible or not, and working to find compromises where necessary.

In our projects, Participatory Action Research (PAR) is part of any development with First Nations communities, as the source of issues and the possible solutions will only be known to community members, not to those with different priorities, values and experiences. In the recent COVID crisis, First Nations people were forcibly moved from urban areas back to their communities, to ‘protect them’. Due to distrust of government, the communities were ready to get up and all move to urban areas, they understood from this forced move that living in communities must be harmful. By elders and leaders demanding to be informed, the health message started to be delivered to community leaders, not just the health clinic workers, and the community started taking control of the messaging. As a result, very few First Nations people in the NT died from COVID.

First Nations are more familiar with working in this way and will always guide projects to consider this process as important. Similarly other groups are realising it is import to consider the great human and physical environment.

Learning Focus

There are various case studies in software that illustrate the failure of developments without client involvements and the history of Participatory Design (PD) in Human Computer Interaction.  Students can run a design project using PAR or PD so they become used to the steps involved, and reflect on the changes to their design that result from this work

We try and invite members of the client community in to assess such projects done for a community, so that students start to realise that design with community is different. This has an advantage as only one session will be required for the students to get feedback on their presentations. In designing with First Nations communities, the situation is so different to what students tend to assume, this point is brought home easily.