The path is made by walking: knowledge, policy design and impact in Indigenous policymaking

Abstract

2020 threw into stark relief the fact that the impact of policy interventions in Indigenous affairs over the last decade and a half has been scandalously minimal. Explanations for this focus on technocratic themes such as implementation, leadership failure or lack of resources. The problem, however, is not a technical one, there is something wrong with the policy design related to Indigenous Australians. Policy design involves questions of not just what we know, but how we know, and how this knowledge is mobilized in and through policymaking. Policy impact Indigenous contexts is low precisely because contemporary policymaking excludes the knowledge and insights of Indigenous people. This makes important knowledge inaccessible to state and non-state actors, and fatally weakens policymaking. This paper appropriates the concept of metis to interrogate the root of policy failure in processes of epistemological exclusion and suppression that underpin modern statecraft is of critical importance to improving the impact of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy enterprise. The chief contention is that improved impact in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy enterprise hinges on centering Aboriginal metis at the epistemic, discursive, and conceptual core of the enterprise.

Keywords:

• Policy design
• indigenous
• policymaking
• knowledge
• policy impact
• policy failure

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 This idea is akin to Foucault’s concept of dispositif that I have argued elsewhere provides a powerful analytical perspective on the operational dynamics of the policy enterprise. See (Ritchie 2021)

2 This social constructionist approach to knowledge stands in stark contrast, and challenge, to hegemonic epistemological positions of contemporary policymaking where knowledge is positioned outside questions of meaning and independent of human thought as something to be discovered, articulated, and applied to solve problems.

3 Scott defines legibility as “the state's attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. Having begun to think in these terms, I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft” (Scott 1998:2)

4 In some sense this idea is tautological. Knowledge requires knowers and to posit that some knowledge is of the people while other knowledge is not, is nonsensical. But for analytical purposes this distinction is employed to highlight the difference between metis and what Scott calls “epistemological” knowledge.

5 Some care is required in understanding metis as local. While there is undoubtedly some degree of territoriality in the idea of metis, there is equally the idea of particularity. As much as metis is local knowledge, i.e. pertaining to certain locations, it is also particular knowledge that belongs to specific groups of people who may in live in dispersed and multiple locations while retaining an identity and sense of belonging that transcends these localities. For example, 85% of Torres Strait Islanders live on mainland Australia however still retain a strong sense of Islander identity and access to the metic knowledge that forms part of this identity (Nakata 2007). This is a critical counter to the hegemonic localism at work in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy enterprise that I argue distorts popular and professional understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and identities and ultimately corrupts our policymaking efforts.

6 Perhaps one of the best examples of this kind of knowledge is what we have come to describe in the public sector as “judgement”. Anyone who has been involved in recruitment exercises that involve assessing candidates for senior roles in the APS will be aware of the importance attached to the “showing judgement”. Judges represents a form of public sectors know-how (metis) that is not something that can be taught – there are not APSC courses one can do in judgement. This is a knowledge and practice that is acquired in the doing and in the belonging and can only be acquired in situ.

7 Primarily quantitative data at that.

8 Often these policymakers, for the most part outsiders, proceed on their own terms and from their own cultural positions. Perhaps this is symptomatic of the political nature of modernist policymaking, but it is also an effect of the epistemic conflict that this paper is seeking to highlight. In any event, the dominant epistemic regimes within which the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy enterprise is carried out means that officials are singularly ill-equipped for the kind of policymaking that is theorised in the co-design rhetoric, which Indigenous people demand, and which is the sine qua non for better policy in the future.

9 This survey is necessarily brief and selective. Its purpose is to connect the concept of metis elaborated by Scott and deployed in this analysis to the rich work of Australian Indigenous scholars in a range of policy domains. The literature is diverse and growing and readers are urged to engage with it in a systematic and considered way.

10 I would argue that his position applies equally to any colonial institution including, most importantly, in the context of this article, the public sector.

11 https://www.pmc.gov.au/news-centre/indigenous-affairs/new-national-agreement-closing-gap