ARC Discovery Project DP160102250 Reciprocal Accountability and Public Value in Aboriginal Organisations

This is the first ARC Discovery grant to be won by the University of Notre Dame Australia. The project has received $466,000. It is led by Professor Patrick Sullivan of the Nulungu Research Institute, Broome, in partnership with the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University. CAEPR has provided two other Chief Investigators, Dr Julie Lahn and Associate Professor Janet Hunt.

Aboriginal organisations throughout Australia are the main sites for representation of Aboriginal identity and for the delivery of vital services that all Australians agree Aboriginal people have a right to receive. But how much should Aboriginal identity and values affect the way that services are delivered and the kind of services delivered? Will this affect the quality of services? What are the best ways of assessing whether identity and values are being preserved and whether service is of high quality?

This project uses anthropological method and the organisational theory of public value (Moore, 1995) to understand a key point of contestation between Aboriginal and mainstream Australia - how Aboriginal organisations can meet their social obligation of rigorous accountability for efficient use of public money, or publicly-owned resources, and at the same time stay responsive to their origins as community organisations grounded in local Aboriginal cultures. This is a key question for public management theory, intercultural anthropology and Australian governance.

Public and governmental organisations produce public value. In contrast, private value is produced by private organisations in industry and elsewhere (Moore, 1995: 28-29). The unique aspect of public value in contrast to private value is that the process for its creation is as important as its outcome. How the service is delivered is as important as what is delivered. The significance of public value theory for Aboriginal organisations has not yet been explored.

Aboriginal organisations must be responsive to their local communities, not only as a matter of commitment, but also to be effective in service delivery. Yet they are also accountable to the non-indigenous community when they deliver services on behalf of governments. Where they are community-owned social enterprises they need to be accountable for the appropriate use of community resources. But, inappropriate ways of reporting can limit the efficiency of an enterprise and fail to measure the true worth of the activities for which they were established. Reporting and accountability should be based on value-creation, not simply on expenditure.

The project will assess the value that these organisations produce, the public that they produce it for, and the way public values are assessed and accounted for. We investigate how Kimberley Aboriginal organisations currently produce public value, how they account for it and how they could do it better.

Outcomes to date:

  • Sullivan, P 2017 Evaluating Programmes Where Culture is a Significant Element of Programme Success: a Short Discussion Paper, Unpublished paper, Nulungu Research Institute and Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre.
  • Sullivan, P 2017 A Child Early Intervention and Family Support Network for the Kimberley, unpublished report, Nulungu Research Institute and Aarnja Pty Ltd, Broome.
  • Thorburn, K 2017 A regional governance structure for the Kimberley? Twenty-five years on from Crocodile Hole, Australian Aboriginal Studies, Issue 1:86 – 98.
  • Hunt, J 2018 ‘Normalising’ Aboriginal Housing in the Kimberley: Challenges at the Interface of New Public Management Approaches, CAEPR Working Paper 123, Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, Australian National University, Canberra.
  • Sullivan, P 2018 The Tyranny of Neoliberal Public Management and the Challenge for Aboriginal Community Organisations, in Howard-Wagner, D, Bargh, M and Altamirano-Jimenez (eds) The Neoliberal State, Recognition and Indigenous Rights: New paternalism to new imaginings, CAEPR Monograph 40, ANU Press, Canberra:201-215.
  • Hunt, J 2021 Bureaucratised relationships: contracting for change, in Strakosch, E; Lahn, J; and Sullivan, P (eds) 2021, Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia, (in process).
  • Lahn, J 2021 First Nations public servants and public sector bureaucracy, in Strakosch, E; Lahn, J; and Sullivan, P (eds) 2021, Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia, (in process).
  • Strakosch, E; Lahn, J; and Sullivan, P (eds) 2021, Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia, (in process).
  • Sullivan, P 2021 , Manage the Bureaucracy, Control the State; Creeping Monoculturalism and Standardisation of Australian Indigenous Diversity, in Strakosch, E; Lahn, J; and Sullivan, P (eds) Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia, (in process).
  • Thorburn, K., Ward, JE., Kinnane, S 2021 Making the intangible count? Metrification of the value of cultural activities, in Strakosch, E; Lahn, J; and Sullivan, P (eds) 2021, Bureaucratic Occupation: Government and First Nations Peoples in Australia, (in process).
  • Sullivan, P 2021, Belonging in the Country: the Mythic Landscape of Australian Monoculturalism, in Perley, Bernard, C (ed) Cartographies of Erasure, University of New Brunswick Press (in process).

Future Outcomes:

  • Schipf, A, The Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Culture Centre (KALACC) and women’s culture in the Kimberley region, Nulungu Working Paper Series (in preparation, due 2021)
  • Sullivan, P (ed), Voices from the Front Line: community leaders, government managers and charity workers talk about what’s wrong in Aboriginal development and what they’re doing to fix it, Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia (in preparation. Due 2022).