Understanding barriers to new approaches – a case study from Australian remote indigenous policy

ABSTRACT

To tackle complex problems, such as Indigenous development, governments are turning to new approaches but struggling to implement them. This paper argues that understanding the complexities of the underlying, well established, policy world is critical to understanding this struggle. Using Logics of Critical Explanation explicates policy actor engagement with inherent tensions in Australian remote Indigenous policy where new ways of working are being tested at a national level. This approach provides important insights into the ongoing resistance to attempts to introduce new norms and into the capacities needed in policy actors asked to implement them.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical policy analysis
• interpretive methods
• collaboration
• Indigenous policy
• Logics of Critical Explanation

Acknowledgments

The author acknowledges the very helpful comments of Brian Head and Elizabeth Strakosch and colleagues who attended a seminar at the School of Political Science and International Studies where the paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This assumption is of course contestable. For an analysis of the reasons why the results of the interviews support this premise, please see Brown (2017).

2. For simplicity, I refer to the Northern Territory as a state.

3. GBMs were government officers located in each community responsible for managing the engagement process between the government and the community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Postgraduate Award

Notes on contributors

Prudence R. Brown

Prudence R. Brown recently completed her PhD, which built upon and extended her professional experience in this policy field during nearly 20 years in senior policy roles in the Northern Territory, Australian and Queensland governments. She has also conducted consultancies for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, World Bank and UNDP.