Understanding the Effects of the Public Service System on Local Governance in Aboriginal Settlements in Desert Australia
Mark Moran, Desert Knowledge Cooperative Research Centre and Centre for Appropriate Technology
The public service system administering Aboriginal affairs across desert Australia is changing at an unprecedented rate, resulting in increasing complexity and number of actors and agencies. Aboriginal leaders and employees are overwhelmed by the changes and describe an ever increasing administrative burden. The paper examines the pervasive effects of the pubic service system on Aboriginal involvement in decision-making. Governments and their agents are preoccupied with finding linear deterministic ‘solutions’ to new conceptualisation of the ‘problem’ that they can package and vertically implement. In reality, the day-to-day governance of public services operates as a complex system, characterised by limited predictability, non-linear dynamics, process dependency, self-organisation and feedback among multiple scales. The paper introduces four parameters to better understand this complex adaptive system: connectivity, functional rescaling, accountability mapping, and practical adaptation. These parameters promote a shift in perspective from controlling change in a system assumed to be stable, to enhancing the capacity of actors to learn and live with a dynamic system and for them to find ways to transform it into more desirable directions. The complexities and tensions of the public service system in Aboriginal affairs cannot be escaped, but they can be made more creative, and their destructive tendencies curbed.
