Looking after country: institutional arrangements for Indigenous lands management in Australia

Abstract

This paper reports on research conducted for the Indigenous Land Corporation, an Australian government agency concerned with the acquisition and management of lands for indigenous peoples. The paper seeks to identify and analyze the kinds of institutional arrangements that might be deployed to support indigenous communities in the management of indigenous-owned land. It is concerned with a particular planning context in which the role of state agencies is focused on supporting and facilitating the work of indigenous landowners. This paper considers how best to arrange the institutional systems and processes of the nation state to support the management of indigenous lands management by their indigenous owners. To this end, the paper interrogates the utility of three models of planning: (1) institutional-regulatory, (2) community-based planning, and (3) reticulist, or facilitated process, approaches. The paper identifies the advantages and disadvantages of each of these approaches and argues for the development of a hybrid approach that integrates the positive features of all three models. The paper concludes that this hybrid model offers a set of institutional arrangements that enable collaborative planning between indigenous peoples and institutions of the state.