Healthy Country, Healthy People: Policy Implications of Links between Indigenous Human Health and Environmental Condition in Tropical Australia

Investment in programs that help Indigenous people undertake work maintaining the environmental health of their country has benefits for the environment as well as the physical, mental and cultural health of the Indigenous people involved. For health these findings have direct implications for some national health policies, service provision to homelands, health promotion and Indigenous health research. There are also direct implications for environmental investment in northern Australia and the design and regulation of markets in resource entitlements. Indirectly the findings should be important for economic, employment and education policies as well as those promoting social harmony. Given the range of benefits there is a strong argument for cross-agency investment in working on country by Indigenous people.     

Problems of Indigenous Community Councils in North Australia

Since 1978 community councils have been able to directly qualify for Northern Territory government funding. Community councils have therefore become instruments for community governance as well as being responsible for delivering municipal services to Northern Territory Indigenous communities. The effectiveness of these councils are influenced by the community/cultural environment and the strategic environment. A community council plays an important role in negotiations between these two environments. The article observes that there is a strong separation of responsibilities in communities between those relating to municipal services and those relating to community/cultural issues and suggests a realignment of supervisory authority and de‐concentration of responsibilities within community councils.     

Human Ecology and Public Policy: Overcoming the Hegemony of Economics

The thinking of those with the power to formulate and implement public policy is now almost totally dominated by the so-called science of economics. While efforts have been made to supplement or modify economics to make it less brutal or less environmentally blind, here it is suggested that economics is so fundamentally flawed and that it so completely dominates the culture of late modern capitalism (or postmodernity) that a new master human science is required to displace it and provide an alternative co-ordinating framework for research and for defining reality. This could then provide an alternative basis for formulating public policy. It is argued that if human ecology is to fill this role, it must be developed on consistently anti-reductionist foundations, and that such a social science would totally reorient public policy from a domain for power elites to a domain for genuinely democratic societies to define and control their destinies.     

Reinventing the Governance of Public Finances in Remote Indigenous Australia

The economies of remote Indigenous settlements are dominated by public finances. The current system of governing public finance is highly saturated, fragmented and centralised, and this has a corrosive effect on local governance capability. The political accountability of leaders to their constituents is weakened in favour of an administrative accountability ‘upwards’ to higher authorities. New Public Management reforms have promoted administrative deconcentration, over political devolution, and this has been accompanied by an influx of public servants, Non‐Government Organisations (NGOs) and private contractors, and a decline in Indigenous organisations and local government. The end result in many settlements is a marked disengagement of Indigenous people in their own governance. There is evidence of considerable political capabilities existing within local government electorates. Decentralised financing arrangements can be used to catalyse these capabilities and then address deficits in administrative and technical performance.     

Once more into surplus: Reforming expenditure management in Australia and Canada

Canadian and Australian federal government budgets have returned to surplus. Over the past two decades both countries have undertaken financial management and budgetary reforms in an effort to control expenditure growth and public debt. They exchanged ideas, borrowed techniques, and shared reform experiences. Yet during the mid-1980s and early 1990s they displayed markedly different levels of success in expenditure control. This article explains why relatively similar instruments of expenditure control and financial management produced different outcomes in Australia and Canada. The analysis suggests that budgetary techniques will have marginal impact unless they are congruent with broader policy management systems and administrative cultures. The comparative analysis provides important lessons for budget reformers in all jurisdictions.     

Structural Reform of Local Government in Australia: A Sustainable Amalgamation Model for Country Councils

Abstract. Council amalgamation has always been the major policy instrument for structural reform in Australian local government. While the Australian literature has spawned taxonomic attempts at classifying models of structural change in local government, a serious deficiency in this body of work has been the specification of amalgamation as an undifferentiated category embodying the unconditional merger of many small local authorities into a single larger entity. This paper seeks to remedy this problem by developing a model of sustainable amalgamation and contrasting it with unconditional amalgamation in using a stylised example derived from four existing Western Australian country shires contemplating consolidation.     

用发展、变化的观点认识农村和农村经济——建设社会主义新农村的经济学理论思考

独立性、封闭性、落后性是传统农村与农村经济的基本特征。只有逐步改变传统农村和农村经济所固有的上述特征,不断调整历史上形成的城乡经济社会分割格局,才有可能从根本上克服作为各自独立的城市系统与农村系统所必然产生的一系列矛盾,并为整个经济社会的协调发展开辟广阔的前景。城乡一体化是建设社会主义新农村的必由之路。城市化应当是推动农村发展的城市化,社会主义新农村应当是城市化进程中的新农村。     

National Policy‐Making in Indigenous Affairs: Blueprint for an Indigenous Review Council

This article examines the dearth of any representative Indigenous role in national Indigenous affairs policy‐making and suggests a remedy. After making the case for a specific Indigenous place in national policy‐making, the article considers the reasons for the failure of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), the body that filled this brief for a decade and a half. The article then considers three possible ways of ensuring an Indigenous role in the policy‐making process: a replacement for ATSIC with specific policy powers; set seats for Indigenous representatives in federal parliament; and the creation of a new elected body whose role would be to review Indigenous affairs legislation. The article concludes that the latter proposal in particular is worth trialling as it would ensure a significant Indigenous voice in national policy‐making while learning from the mistakes that led to ATSIC's demise.     

Voices on Paper: Multimodal Texts and Indigenous Literacy in Brazil

This paper focuses on the recent production of multimodal writing in an indigenous community in Brazil, resulting from the equally recent introduction of literacy. Seeing this form of writing as part of the process of intercultural semiosis and cultural translation, the paper discusses how concepts of local indigenous oral culture and received wisdom interact with the Western concept of writing as the ‘record’ or ‘representation’ of speech, bringing to writing the indigenous notion of cultural ‘enactment’ or ‘performativity’. In an effort to overcome a view of alphabetic writing as semantically only propositional, mimetic and decontextualized, the Kashinawa´ community, by adding visual components to alphabetic texts, appear to transform writing into contextualized performative ‘poiesis’, which simul taneously inaugurates a complex process of semiosis inseparable and only comprehensible from their local cultural perspective.     

Indigenous rights in El Salvador: Prospects for change

Conclusion In 1996, the National Association of Salvadoran Indians participated in a UN-sponsored conference on the development of forest resources. Their involvement in the conference highlighted the growing international presence of Salvadoran indigenous organizations. Unfortunately, there is also very limited information available on these groups. As some have commented: The Salvadoran Indians … are an invisible or ghostly presence in the country: cautious in their public presence as an ethnic community, officially non-existent—yet still recognised by neighbours, local municipal governments and, most importantly, by themselves as indios. As the country becomes more accessible to researchers and as indigenous Salvadorans gain a stronger foothold in the international forum, it is very likely indigneous peoples will emerge from the historical shadows to forcefully claim their rights as distinct members of Salvadoran society. The obstacles they face are not inconsequential. State opposition to indigenous organizations is strong and popular perceptions are often harder to dislodge than state policies. The widespread support gained by organizations like ANIS during the civil war proves that there is sympathy for indigenous rights. It remains to be seen to what extent ANIS and other organizations can use this support, and that of indigenous allies around the world, to promote the goals and aspirations of indigenous Salvadorans. While the issue of indigenous rights has long been discussed in other countries, it is only beginning to be addressed in El Salvador.     

Hybrid Polities and Indigenous Pluralities: Advanced Lessons in Statebuilding from Cambodia

Abstract

Statebuilding as a panacea for post-conflict societies is a largely uncriticised notion, like the liberal democracy it articulates. But, according to some, the policy framework of large-scale transitional statebuilding is often inappropriate, in particular where its focus on liberal democratic forms either ignores or tries to overwrite structural determinants shaping particular national behaviours. Democratic assumptions run so deeply that, without necessarily having overt intent, the lack of reflection upon the paradigmatic assumptions of Western models, often results in the denial of legitimate and viable alternatives. A more minimal approach, which could be based upon limited externally-supported electoral support encouraging indigenous organisation, however, offers to reverse the imperious and democracy-orientated trend, and to promote internally legitimate plural-indigenous systems with long-term sustainability.     

Indigenous citizens in the making: civic belonging and racialized schooling in Chile

This paper explores expressions of sociocultural and political subjectivity among indigenous youth located within four secondary boarding schools in the Araucanía Region of Chile. For rural indigenous students, these schools are a primary site in which they come to gain a sense of themselves as members of civil society and as future citizens. Drawing on young peoples’ experiences in boarding facilities and expressions regarding sociopolitical positioning, we analyse the ways Mapuche youth engage with the racially and class-inflected hierarchies of inequality present in the school, the region and beyond. Within these school spaces, little intellectual space afforded young people to consider how civic inclusion can be renegotiated in relation to indigenous identifications. Nevertheless, the young people demonstrate a capacity to engage critically with national discourses from media and schooling. Whilst not widely engaged in politicized youth activism, the pupils demonstrated agency by positioning themselves critically in quotidian and negotiated re-workings of the meaning of citizenship.     

Non-governmental Organizations and Governmentality: 'Consuming' Biodiversity and Indigenous People in the Philippines

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing an increasingly important role in the process Foucault called 'governmentality'. Drawing on the Foucauldian literature, this paper uses a case study of biodiversity conservation as well as indigenous people's ancestral domain in the Philippines to show how two quite different NGO-led conservation agendas nonetheless share a common underlying purpose: persuading indigenous people to internalize state control through self-regulation. Ironically, it is this sort of NGO contribution to the elaboration of government (in the Foucauldian sense) that may turn out be the most significant and lasting contribution that NGOs make to social change.     

Economics and elections: Effects deep and wide

Introduction to a Special Edition of Electoral Studies, by the co-editors. Papers included in this special issue were originally presented at a pair of conferences on economic voting that were held at the University of Iowa and Texas A&M University in the spring of 2012.