Richie Howitt, Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University, NSW, 2109

paper presented to 'Rethinking Economy: Alternative Accounts', Australian National University, Canberra (August 1999)

The persistence of indigenous rights rooted in economic systems that predate the creation of colonial property rights and assertions of frontier conquest and dispossession, unsettles dominant ideas of industrialisation and development as unproblematic goals for regional economic policy.

In the United States, some Native American Nations retain rights that unequivocally predate the American Constitution and were not subsumed by it. These rights include significant economic interests in subsurface minerals, surface and subsurface water, timber and wildlife resources. In Canada, government efforts to discipline and extinguish common law and treaty rights have produced highly significant shifts in public policy, including political restructuring, constitutional reform and new theories of economic relations between indigenous and settler nations. In New Zealand, taking the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi seriously has contributed to the emergence of a new resource management and planning regime in which Maori values influence how regional economic decisions are made.

Australia's courts and parliaments were late in entering this arena. Acknowledgement of indigenous Australians' rights stemming from pre-colonial social formations and recognizable by the common law as 'native title', unsettles assumptions that underpin policy settings, community values and perceptions, legal and regulatory infrastructure, and discursive communities that shape regional economic development policy and practice. In doing so, new discursive and material spaces in which different foundations for weaving economic, social and environmental justice into the social fabric are opened up. This paper seeks to explore some of those spaces.

For many indigenous groups, opportunities to participate in economic activity on more equal terms are eagerly embraced. Diverse partnerships are emerging between some groups and commercial interests in training, employment and production across a range of industries, particularly mining, tourism and agriculture and grazing. Indigenous economic development programs target all building an economic base, servicing community needs, and diversifying economic activity. These programs have achieved some progress in delivering more equitable economic outcomes for indigenous Australians on key indicators such as income and employment. It is not my purpose in this paper to critique or discredit such programs, nor to question the authenticity of those indigenous Australians who are committed to such programs.

Rather, this paper considers the challenge posed at a deeper level by recognising indigenous peoples as sovereign participants in economic activity. Economic relations in Australian indigenous societies have always defied the conventional categories of economics. Where social relations (people-to-people relations) are ontologically embedded in ecological-economic relations (people-to-country relations), categories such as 'economic base' and 'ideological superstructure' are unhelpful. And where the foundational concepts of 'Dreaming' can best be characterised as 'everywhere' and 'everywhen', categories such as 'growth' and 'private profit' are difficult to grasp and operationalise. Gibson-Graham (1996) challenges the extent to which capitalist epistemology is embedded within the categories used to describe and analyse economic relations and economic processes. For indigenous peoples, the failure to incorporate even such basic elements as subsistence production into national economic statistics, or to see 'caring for country' and maintenance of indigenous cultural capital as 'productive activity' reinforces both economic and social marginalisation. And the political declaration of profit, growth and development as the singular measure of economic success entrenches environmental exploitation and cultural alienation as the fundamental basis for indigenous participation in what is widely-admired as western pluralist democracy - what Cramer refers to as the 'cleptocracy - extractive exploitation' (1994: 55).

Rejection of the foundational legal concept of terra nullius frames systemic challenges of three sorts - ideological, socio-cultural and political-economic. The indigenous rights movement's early emphasis on 'land rights' and the persistence of indigenous presence in areas previously considered to be 'wilderness' has meant that these challenges were felt earliest in areas that liberal democracies targeted as conservation lands. In shifting towards sustainable environmental management arrangements for these areas, environmental scientists have increasingly had to take indigenous epistemologies seriously. Co-management arrangements, once seen as highly progressive for including indigenous owners, are increasingly pressured not only to incorporate indigenous knowledge into scientifically ratified management regimes, but to support indigenous self-determination and control of country, with information input and negotiation of process with scientists as co-equals, partners or in a more marginal 'advisory' or 'support' role. There has been no parallel transformation of economic development strategies. This paper seeks to open this discursive space. It takes seriously the challenge of responding to indigenous epistemologies in the economic arena.

I want to tackle five key ideas in regional economic development discourse and target them for critical interrogation. They are:

• planning;
• management;
• capacity building;
• institutional strengthening; and
• negotiating.

Much economic policy aimed at nurturing improved on-the-ground outcomes for indigenous Australians emphasizes these strategies. Community planning and regional planning exercises are entrenched in many ATSIC, community government, Land Council and community association procedures. Planning has become the almost persistent imposition of linear notions of time (and bounded notions of space) upon social and economic activities that have previously been accountable to different values. Good management is seen as the unquestionable goal of economic planning, yet in epistemological structures that are radically ex-centric, with human affairs contextualised in sentient landscapes, management as such is almost literally unthinkable. And when it comes to those key developmentalist interventions of 'capacity building' and 'institutional strengthening', we are confronted with epistemological differences about 'capacity', 'institutions' and 'strength'. Similarly, in seeking to 'negotiate' outcomes, there is often profound misunderstanding about goals, purpose and process in even non-conflictual arrangements.

Leaving these concepts unquestioned leaves the epistemological dominance of western liberalism (the cleptocracy) not just unchallenged, but invisible. In rethinking the foundational concepts that indigenous peoples might use as building blocks in shaping alternative economic futures, we really do need to interrogate the terms of engagement which set the parameters of action and debate. Strategically, in seeking to decolonise the regional economies in which indigenous peoples are implicated, we need to construct building blocks that mean something to people on the ground - we need to quite re-think them - reconceptualise them, indigenise them, and continually interrogate them for deeply-embedded colonising effects.

Planning has been a central idea in the developmentalist agenda. On both the right and the left, planning is virtually unchallenged as a basic strategic tool for achieving social, political and economic goals. Escobar (1992: 132) suggests 'no other concept has been so insidious [nor] … gone so unchallenged'. There is some critical literature on the role of planning in disciplining space and controlling people to rationalist visions of the future (eg Healy 1997; Beauregard 1989)), and some effort to connect planning theory to theoretical debates about marginality, identity and difference (eg Sandercock 1995). But the orientation of much of this critique is more towards how to include those that planning has conventionally excluded rather than how the epistemological foundations of planning constitute some ways of thinking, some ways of being-in-place, as irrational.

Planning is fundamentally predicated on a way of envisioning the future as open to influence by deliberate human intervention. Put simply, planning is predicated ontologically on a linear, progressivist view of time. It is rooted in a view that prioritises becoming, moving towards, achieving and goal setting. It disciplines change to a singular view of what is worthwhile, valued and desirable. Using metaphors of social engineering, it universalises one version of western experience in what Rose (1997: 4) refers to as 'hall of mirrors' where it 'mistakes its reflection for the world'. In exploring Yolngu approaches to resource negotiations, Christie and Perrett (1996) offer some insights into the ontological constraints facing application of 'planning' in other social systems. In the Dreaming, it is time's circle rather than time's arrow that provides the fundamental metaphor of change over time. Ideology disciplines social change to conform to existing patterns, forms and explanations. What might 'planning' look like in such a setting? As Escobar (1992: 144) puts it, 'there is a need for some sort of organized or directed social change … [but] categories and meanings have to be redefined'.

For indigenous people in Australia, prospects to challenge systems of planning and accountability that have redefined their relationship with state institutions in the 1980s and 1990s have been opened up a little by legal acknowledgement persistent rights. One view of the negotiation and amendment of the Native Title Act 1993 is that it aimed to make the unruly pluralism of ill-defined rights and responsibilities derived from diverse systems of customary law amenable to the discipline of planning. For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander negotiators, the aim was to open what Pearson (1996; 1994) calls a 'recognition space': to open possibilities of allowing unruly pluralism to take root in wider Australian society, to retain space for indigenous ways of being-in-place to provide foundations for economic, social and environmental justice that does not abdicate responsibility to a depersonalised planning system, but embeds it in the lives of those who are implicated in the economic, social and environmental relationships involved.

In mission settlements and government reserves, indigenous people's lives, resources and futures were 'managed' to conform to all manner of racist presumptions. In many ways, the best that white Australia had to offer indigenous people was a well-intention and dehumanising paternalism that wanted to help the traumatised victims of history to manage better their post frontier realities. The tools of management - education, training, organisation, SWOT analyses, SLAP plans, needs assessments and so on - were offered on terms that seemed generous to many. Special programs to equip Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders with the things they lacked were put in place, and a bureaucracy developed to manage it. The cultural alienation that success produced was seen as a temporary aberration. And the failures reconstituted as hopeless cases, or efforts to go too far too fast (with barely disguised imposition of a linear progressivist view of success).

One of the fundamental lessons to be drawn from the development studies literature is the need for development programs to target capacity building of the participants. Along with institutional strengthening (see below), capacity building is a basic strategy in development planning. Yet what is being built in these strategies? Whose capacity to do what is the focus of this work? Again, the embeddedness of profoundly powerful epistemological assumptions is difficult to escape. It is often people's capacity to plan, to manage, to participate in development opportunities, to conform to the linear trajectory of rationalist development narratives that is being built. And like so much developmentalist construction, this building is predicated on the demolition (or rejection) of the value of existing capacities. That unruly pluralism of cultural diversity is disciplined to conform to tightly controlled agendas of production, education, performance and good governance.

In achieving ownership of land or resources, in succeeding in setting up community-based enterprises, or managing community development employment programs etc, indigenous communities are often set up to fail. Resources are withheld, delayed, or offered under strict and inappropriate conditions. Responsibilities are imposed without concomitant rights being recognised. Accountability is reconstituted in financial rather than political terms, and the intended beneficiaries of capacity building exercises and development programs are alienated from them. Again, the terms of engagement are set externally to conform to the dominant verities of economic development discourse.

The strategic partner of capacity building in the development discourse is institutional strengthening. Systems with unruly institutional arrangements are difficult to manage. The recognition space created by the common law's acknowledgement of native title does not extend to indigenous institutions unless they can be transformed to conform to the legal requirements of 'good governance' (eg accountability, transparency, efficiency etc). In developing institutional arrangements to advance recognition of indigenous rights, the dominant developmentalist discourse strengthens institutions that it recognises. It seeks to reproduce within indigenous institutions those relationships and processes that characterise its own institutional forms. To return to Rose's 'hall of mirrors' image, much institutional strengthening is 'monologue masquerading as conversation; masturbation posing as productive interaction' (1997: 4).

It is important to make it clear that this critique of the epistemological constraints imposed by these terms and categories will not be adequately addressed by overthrowing one set of universals for another. Marginalised, traumatised, dispossessed and often disfunctional indigenous societies are no more a source of universal truth than the flawed, dehumanised and disfunctional systems whose smoke and mirrors approach to being-in-place has entrenched economic, social and environmental injustice as characterising contemporary social relations. In rethinking the building blocks of regional economies in ways that might entrench economic, social and environmental justice in the social fabric, we are unlikely to find concepts, categories and exemplars of what might be. Where even the imaginaries have been so deeply colonised by the dominant discourse of cleptocracy, we need to reshape not just the relationships of power, but also the concepts, language and images we use to describe, analyse and address the processes. We need to rethink the building blocks that come in the form of words, ideas and propositions as well as applying new analytical tools to the material relationships and processes. This presents multi-dimensional challenges as much to indigenous groups as to mainstream or progressive development agencies.

In the post-Native Title period, negotiation has become a catch-cry for indigenous empowerment. The identification of regional agreements, Indigenous Land Use Agreements, mediated settlements of claims and resource co-management solutions to land and resource use conflicts in areas where indigenous people are asserting their claims has pushed negotiation into the strategic spotlight. Although this is essential and important, it is also a path beset with pitfalls. The importance of expert advice, legal sophistication and careful planning and strategising are factors that constitute 'negotiation' as an area in which the tension between decolonisation and deep colonisation is acute (see also Gibbs 1999). The imperative is to constantly challenge fundamental notions such as expertise and negotiation as containing the epistemological constraints that negotiation is meant to overcome. Vigilance and openness, then, are the inescapable imperatives for those engaged in processes that are meant to unsettle the certainties of developmentalist exploitation and empower indigenous interests within landscapes of coexistence.

The intense localism of much of the political domain in indigenous affairs represents another challenge to the far-reaching rethinking of conceptual and political building block of just and sustainable regional economies. The economic reality of many remote indigenous areas is that there is a backlog of basic infrastructure and service provision (housing, health hardware, transport and communications infrastructure etc) that will be overcome only by a revolutionary about-face from the neo-liberal bureaucrats who guard the public purse-strings. At a time when Australian bureaucratic and political elites are seriously considering dismembering public health and welfare systems to facilitate greater levels of efficiency, discipline and control, allocation of massive public funds to undoing decades of trauma, neglect and abuse in indigenous settlements is unlikely. Inevitably, competition for resources (public funds, investment capital, tourist interest etc) between indigenous areas is likely to be intense. And within indigenous groups, there is no guarantee that equity and the public good will drive successful indigenous operators in hybrid systems that continue to devalue many aspects of indigenous epistemologies.

There is, therefore, a scale politics to be considered. Remote indigenous areas are no more isolated from new globalising economic relations than the rustbelt and sunbelt regions more typically seen as characterising the postmodern global economy. Taking local indigenous epistemology seriously does not require denial of wider scale political economic processes. Indeed, the key challenges to remote and rural community leaders is to come to terms with complex material and ideological conditions as a basis for moving on. There's no point trying to build a socialist republic of West Arnhem or Warlpiri when the areas are being deeply embedded within global relations in the uranium, tourism and gold industries. But neither can we pretend that the Dreaming is 'just cultural' and without economic relevance and meaning.

In exploring new models of regional governance and economy, indigenous groups and their supporters (including those non-indigenous people whose rights co-exist with indigenous rights such as native title) must construct approaches that are capable not only of challenging the dominant terms of engagement that are derived from the operations of institutions, processes and relations that were predicated upon terra nullius, but also of encompassing epistemic diversity. There is no epistemic community that bridges indigenous, capitalist, and socialist epistemologies. And a naïve or simplistic accommodation of diversity which denies the embeddedness of power and privilege in social, economic and environmental relations at all scales will reproduce the problems in new forms rather than open new possibilities.

In re-membering these reconceptualised building blocks into more just, equitable and sustainable regional economies, we must address the issue of multiple axes of identity, sovereignty and rights. If we reconsider the metaphor of reconciliation, the effort we engage in is not an accountancy style reconciliation, of bringing two sides together and balancing the accounts. Imagining, building, and refining landscapes in which multiple sovereignties, epistemological diversity, and shifting identities coexist without descent into human rights abuse and environmental or social vandalism is the hard work of reconciliation. It is not the imposition of another externally imposed (or even internally generated) 'correct line' or 'shining path' to liberation. It is not the devaluation of people of any description, but the hard work of working with those who are the stakeholders, in the contexts that shape being-in-place. This requires consideration of multiple scales as well as multiple stakeholders, and organising, analysing and refining engagement rather than strategic isolationism. And it is worth restating that this contextualistion is not just economic and political, but also simultaneously cultural, environmental and philosophical. This multi-scale, multi-dimensional openness, then, is what underpins planning for, management of and negotiating about the viable interdependence, situtated availability and situated engagement that Jacobs, Mulvihill, Rose and Suchet refer to.

Recognition of native title, metaphors of 'reconciliation' and 'coexistence' and ideas of 'indigenous sovereignty' offer fertile ground for rethinking regional economic development strategies in Australia. In particular, admission that indigenous peoples are genuine stakeholders in the arena of regional economic activity -- their transformation from marginalised victims of colonialism to active agents in the economic landscape -- demands that the unquestioned privileging of the developmentalist project be challenged at many levels in efforts to rethink economic process, policy and practice. This admission will not only see the emergence of negotiated economic settlements over specific sites, resources and projects, but will also see far-reaching challenges to institutional, legal, social and constitutional arrangements the have been predicated on assumptions of terra nullius. The discursive space created by these challenges opens up many concepts and strategies that might have previously seemed settled. Ideas that were once fundamental to strategies for local or regional economic empowerment, need to be reconsidered. Ideas that might have once been rejected as anathema to local empowerment, might be amenable to appropriation, rethinking and new applications.

I have previously argued that 'recognition' of indigenous rights opens up opportunities for 'decolonisation' of indigenous spaces (Howitt 1998). Rose (1997) points out that most efforts at 'decolonisation' are problematic, having embedded within them tendencies toward what she terms 'deep colonisation'. The tension between these possibilities may well be an ever-present, irresolvable reality (Gibbs 1999), but many strategists (both conservative and progressive) seek to establish certainty by reducing the dialectical complexities of new, open-ended discourses to unambiguous and singular closures.

On the one hand, there is continued expansion of the racist wedge politics of resistance to reconciliation and coexistence, illustrated most dramatically by the work of Pauline Hanson's One Nation. In this view, the victimisation of rural economies by big capital (banks, telecommunications, transport, energy, agribusiness, resources, and public administration) is exacerbated by pro-Aboriginal welfarism which nurtures disfunctional Aboriginal communities to absorb public funding and restrict access to economic resources (particularly land and minerals) to which 'they' are not entitled.

On the other hand, within some rural and remote areas of Australia there is a nascent suggestion that reconciliation and coexistence may offer economic salvation to depressed and marginalised communities. Funding for indigenous employment and enterprise development, land purchases and service delivery; financial flows from special legislation such as land rights and native title statutes; and negotiated agreements with development interests are all elements that are seen as mechanisms for regional economic recovery -- with some flow-on to non-indigenous sectors.

If the metaphors of reconciliation and coexistence are to offer a basis for building more equitable, just and sustainable economic relations in remote and rural communities around Australia, we need to consider how indigenous and Western epistemologies of development might differ, and what might be involved in community-level negotiation of new economic relations on the ground.

The developmentalist project has long sought to bring indigenous peoples' domains within the compass of mainstream economic relations. These areas' relationship to the economic heartlands of society are complex and ambiguous. The absence of development means that some resources remain unexploited, and this makes these areas targets for exploitation and investment (see eg Pollin 1980; Gedicks 1994). The temptation is to rise to the challenge of securing sustainable regional economic development by harnessing the tools of developmentalism to indigenous goals. In framing a conclusion to this paper, I was tempted to do exactly that - to write about something like 'moving towards sustainable regional economies'. Yet such a formulation subtly reinforces the almost invisible epistemology of developmentalism. It is oriented towards a linear narrative of development - an unambiguous movement towards a coherent strategic target. The implicit symbolism is about direction, progression and control. And it is exactly that which I seek to challenge and unsettle here. In a wonderful collection of essays, Le Guin (1989) sets about unsettling many of the conventional certainties of writing science fiction. She suggests, for example, that 'through long practice I know how to tell a story, but I'm not sure I know what a story is' (1989: 37). Under the title 'dancing at the edge of the world', she sets about unsettling the smug assumption that in harnessing the political, geographical, religious and artistic imagination, we can simply make the world as we wish it to be. In the idea of dancing, we see the embeddeness of one set of relationships and processes (the dance) in others (the music, the culture, the community); in the localisation at 'the edge of the world' we can begin to see that every edge is simultaneously a centre; and in the whole image, we can begin to escape the tyranny of the linear narratives of developmentalism, to glimpse the patterns of time's circle as embedded in these relationships and processes, alongside time's arrow. In such images, we may find opportunities to rethink the building blocks we use to shape and reshape regional economies so that we may weave into the social fabric those elements that the epistemology of developmentalism denies exists.

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