Abstract
Indigenous peoples living in remote areas are often reliant on Governments for essential services and local economic development opportunities. Collaboration and partnership in resource planning and management is espoused as an approach that can provide multiple benefits for all stakeholders including more robust and long-lasting decisions, relationship-building and trust between government and community members as well as capacity building and empowerment of citizens. In Australia however, little evidence from the remote Indigenous community context is available to inform successful collaborations. This paper presents novel research using thematic analysis of practitioner interviews and document review to analyse the current situation of service-provider- remote community engagement and collaboration for sustainable water and energy management. An adapted typology of Indigenous engagement is applied as an analytical framework, categorising water and energy management initiatives according to four key types, each with varying levels of collaboration and implications for sustainable water and energy. Application of the typology shows that technocratic approaches to community engagement continue to dominate this space as collaborative processes are constrained by a range of institutional, governance, technical and cultural factors. The findings have implications for research, policy and practice, and point to a need for a systemic approach to address barriers and facilitate genuine collaboration.
Highlights
Ensuring clean, safe, affordable, efficient and equitable supplies of water and energy are key strategies to reduce poverty by 2030 under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1] and foundational for healthy and productive communities
This process identified that the higher level governance context as well as governance of the water and energy management initiatives themselves were key to shaping design elements, having significant flow-on effects to the extent to which collaborations between Indigenous communities and service providers could be realised
The research showed that initiation, funding, and policy cycles that guided project set up and operation reflected the dominance of government-based funding and project management which was led by utilities or government agencies, with limited involvement of communities in the initial set up and establishment of projects
Summary
Safe, affordable, efficient and equitable supplies of water and energy are key strategies to reduce poverty by 2030 under the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) [1] and foundational for healthy and productive communities. Indigenous peoples living in post-colonial settler nations such as Australia, Canada and the United States experience multiple social and economic challenges, including lower levels of health, employment, household income, literacy and life expectancy compared with Non-Indigenous counterparts [7,8,9,10,11]. This is so in remote and regional areas including reservations and other remote settlements where significant proportions of Indigenous populations live (~20% of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population in Australia [8], 38% of the First Nations population in Canada [12] and between 22–54% of First Nations people in the US [13]). The need for improvements to sustainability of essential service supply and use in Indigenous communities is well acknowledged [17]
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