Financial Mechanism and Resources

Increasingly decentralised governance has created opportunities for local voices in planning, monitoring, evaluation and the measurement of effectiveness. Key to ensuring that these voices are heard is the adoption of methodologies that embrace local ways of being and knowing. In 2014 the Balngarra clan from central Arnhem Land in northern Australia gathered to plan for daworro (homeland). This bush research camp brought together Ngala Dakku (right people) at Malnyangarnak outstation to identify actions for achieving visions, partners that can be a part of the journey, and signs to check and/or measure progress. They used participatory action research tools to do this work, some of which have been designed and developed by a local group of research practitioners. This research exemplifies the importance of embracing local ways of being and knowing, of working towards decolonisation, and explains how the Balngarra clan’s work can contribute to their own planning processes at a time when government policies are uncertain and not necessarily supportive.

This year the clan will taking their clan-based plan, and the tools they want to use for monitoring & evaluating it, to a larger gathering of clans to plan for natural resource management partnerships with environmental NGOs, government and private corporations. The ancestral lands and seas of these Indigenous clans is known as Guruwilling (or the Arafura Swamp). It is globally important tropical wetland with high biodiversity, numerous threatened species and cultural and linguistic diversity. The framework the clans have chosen to employ to do this work is known as Healthy Country Planning, which is based on The Nature Conservancy's Conservation Action Planning approach. This model has been implemented by numerous Indigenous groups in Australia, especially in the remote north, who have seen it as useful both for planning, monitoring and evaluating country, and for incorporating Indigenous knowledge and practice into natural resource management and conservation projects in their ancestral lands and seas.

There are two notable elements of this process, certainly in an Australian context. The first is that the planning was initiated and entirely managed by Balngarra clan members themselves using processes that they had developed and thought culturally appropriate. They sought partnerships to help with elements of the plan but clan members set the agenda rather than it being delivered, even if sympathetically, by outside bodies, whether NGOs or government. Secondly the upscaling of the plan is being driven from the bottom up by the members of multiple clans as a means of interacting constructively with organisations that work at larger scales but are critical to the realisation of clan plans through the resources and skills they bring. If interclan cooperation is forced by outsiders, as happens so often, it usually fails because the wrong processes are followed for bringing clans together, and therefore nothing is achieved. The current attempt by multiple clans differs in that it is following ground-up processes developed by the clan members themselves.