Between a rock and a hard place: self-determination, mainstreaming and Indigenous community governance

Abstract

Between a rock and a hard place: self-determination, mainstreaming and Indigenous community governance Janet HuntThe first few years of the new century saw major change in the Australian Government's approach to Indigenous affairs.These developments combined with simultaneous policy shifts in State and Territory jurisdictions to create a period of enormous flux and uncertainty in Indigenous communities and organisations.This chapter aims to help readers understand these changes and the resulting challenges facing the Indigenous community governance bodies involved in our research.Subsequent chapters will indicate that Indigenous people and their organisations actively engaged through this period, trying to manoeuvre their way through these new arrangements towards their own goals.The changes presented opportunities as well as constraints, but this chapter will argue that there is an underlying contradiction that the organisations confront.They are, in a sense, between a rock and a hard place: the assumptions and principles of self-determination underlying the policy environment in which many of them were created have changed.Some new ideas like 'mainstreaming' have been introduced and organisations are finding themselves caught at an uncomfortable intersection between communities operating with one set of assumptions, and governments another.They are also squeezed in the shifting policy space between jurisdictions as different interests exert their influence around them.These organisations are the intercultural space where different 'framings' of the governance challenge (cf.Leach et al. 2007) meet or, at times, collide.At the end of 2007, as this research concluded, a change of government at the national level signalled the potential for a more productive engagement with Indigenous people to address the challenges this paper outlines.