Indigenous-led responsible innovation: lessons from co-developed protocols to guide the use of drones to monitor a biocultural landscape in Kakadu National Park, Australia

ABSTRACT

The scholarship and practice of responsibly navigating the disruptive possibilities of new technologies has yet to fully consider Indigenous worldviews. We draw on Indigenous-led research in northern Australia’s Kakadu National Park to reflect on research practices for responsibly navigating the introduction of aerial drones as a tool for local Indigenous co-managers to monitor and manage this World Heritage Area. We co-developed protocols to guide Indigenous-led innovation – empowering Indigenous governance, developing ethical and trusted research relationships, and enabling on-going Indigenous-led technological innovation. The protocols were applied to negotiate and navigate the use of drone technology at Jarrangbarnmi, an important biocultural landscape in country owned by Jawoyn people in northern Australia. These protocols provide a way for Indigenous cultural responsibilities for knowledge sharing and stewardship of country to guide and authorise the co-design and application of technological innovations, which are increasingly being used to produce new knowledge to adaptively co-manage Indigenous people’s lands and seas.

KEYWORDS:

• Responsible innovation
• indigenous governance
• drones
• environmental monitoring

Introduction

Advances in Responsible Innovation (RI)¹ have prompted diverse and on-going discussions about integrating considerations of ethics and values into research and innovation design, development and practice (Mittelstadt 2019). Proponents of RI have responded to the risks of emerging science and technologies by articulating what they consider ‘responsible’ scientific research and innovation, including anticipating possible future impacts and implications, opening research questions to broader and inclusive dialogue, encouraging reflection on the motivations for and implications of research, and influencing the RI process itself in a responsive manner (Macnaghten et al. 2014, 192; see also Stilgoe, Owen, and Macnaghten 2013; Owen and Pansera 2019). However, whether this framing of responsibility travels and translates from its origins in Europe and North America to other countries and cultures has only just begun to be explored (e.g. Valkenburg et al. 2020). The studies that have addressed how the concept of RI translates across regions and cultures have focused on developing countries (e.g. Vasen 2017; Gao, Liao, and Zhao 2019); less work has been done to understand how responsibility in innovation might be negotiated with Indigenous people. This paper aims to address this gap by drawing on an Indigenous-led research project in Australia’s Kakadu National Park that co-designed protocols with Jawoyn Traditional Owners to ensure Indigenous cultural responsibilities for their knowledge and the country informed why and how we used drones to collect and analyse environmental data.

In this context, any innovation that disrupts Indigenous lands and lives needs to be framed by Indigenous ethics and stewardship of their country. Indigenous groups have a long history of adapting their customary knowledge systems to accommodate new knowledge, innovative practices, and on-ground methods needed to sustain communities and their local environments (Verran and Christie 2007). This includes experimentations that Indigenous people around the world are leading and engaging in, exploring the use of monitoring technologies to tackle increasingly complex environmental management problems like weeds and feral animals, and to care for important species and habitats (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2014, 2017; Arts, van Der Wal, and Adams 2015). However, despite the uptake of technology to monitor and manage Indigenous estates, there is scant published literature on ethical protocols to guide research collaborators in the negotiation and use of technology and the data it procures and produces so that the risks of emerging science and technologies can be mitigated and the principles of responsible innovation can be co-designed and co-developed with Indigenous people (but see Millner 2020).

With this in mind, we draw on our research in northern Australia’s Kakadu National Park to re-examine the idea of ‘responsibility’ for negotiating innovative technologies in cross-cultural contexts and show how this was applied to develop protocols between Traditional Owners and researchers to monitor the environment with aerial drones. Together we co-designed protocols to ensure the use of drones and the data they collected responded to concerns around privacy, data ownership, and ethical risks identified with drone use and surveillance. These protocols were used to guide an approach to RI that empowered Indigenous governance of country, including ensuring Traditional Owner control over when and where technology was used and how it could benefit local people; respected kin-country relationships and joint management responsibilities; and enabled training opportunities for Traditional Owners, Rangers and their young people to learn to use the technology. These protocols have been broadly defined as (1) empowering Indigenous governance; (2) developing ethical and trusted research relationships; and (3) enabling on-going Indigenous-led technological innovation.

Empowering Indigenous voices, rights and ethics in RI frameworks offers new approaches to inclusive co-design and governance of innovative technologies which are now available to monitor the environment. The push for co-designed and governed innovation is important because concerns have been raised that digital technologies and data management tools could disrupt and replace the sensibilities and sensitivities of Indigenous governance systems, including access protocols around secret knowledge (Verran et al. 2007; Nakata et al. 2008). For many Indigenous people across Australia, kinship systems, ceremonies and totems produce regimes of responsibility to care for country; particular individuals have responsibilities for decision-making regarding certain entities, be that particular plants, animals, sacred sites, or stories (Rose 1996). Indigenous knowledge is managed through complex systems, with access to some knowledge restricted based on factors such as seniority and gender. Based on these requirements, some Indigenous groups are designing databases with multi-layer data permissions to allow for individuals to access different knowledge, depending on language-specific cultural governance arrangement related to that knowledge (see Verran 2002; Nakata et al. 2014). However, despite the uptake of monitoring technologies by Indigenous people for environmental decision-making (e.g. Ansell and Koenig 2011; Depczynski et al. 2019), the tools and approaches for ensuring Indigenous governance protocols are woven into their design are still in their infancy (Tengö et al. 2017).

In addition to concerns around innovation governance, the creation and management of digital technologies can perpetuate uneven power relations and exploitative research practices, approaches and methods (Schnierer and Woods 1998). This is of particular concern for Indigenous people involved in research and technology development, who have often not received remuneration for their time, control over their data, or an equal say in the research questions asked or the methods used to answer them (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003; Christie 2006). Drones are also associated with significant privacy, data protection, and ethical risks, including challenges with surveillance (Finn and Wright 2016). Studies have shown surveillance technologies that were designed for wildlife or landscape monitoring being exploited to monitor people, further extending the disciplinary apparatus of the state (see Duffy 2014). Further use of surveillance technologies raises concerns for Indigenous people, who are often already on the receiving end of ‘complex, multi-layered forms of surveillance aimed at securing socially responsible and compliant behaviours’ (Dee 2013, 272), with surveillance practices tending to disproportionally affect disadvantaged members of society (Henman and Marston 2008).

Indeed, technologies introduced in some countries for surveillance of poaching activities and illegal timber extraction have been used to produce data that legitimise military interventions in protected areas, including with the support of international conservation actors (Massé and Lunstrum 2016). Additionally, the physical and psychological distance drones create between the human pilots who are collecting information to understand an environment, their aircraft, and the lands they are surveying could disrupt Indigenous approaches to assessing and understanding their country through intimate human-environmental interactions and stewardship (Haraway 1988; Williams 2011).

Drones clearly have the potential to cause considerable concern if Indigenous people do not understand how they work or the purpose for their introduction (Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2014; Sandbrook 2015). While the safe use of drones in Australia is regulated by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), and most states and territories have rules requiring a permit to fly drones in national parks, the rules and regulations might not be known by local people in detail. The data life cycle might not also be transparent, particularly in relation to how data are collected, stored, used, and shared during a project, and also once the project is finished, especially when data are embedded in databases and shared digitally (Robinson et al. 2021). Indeed, while Australia has some legislative protection for data privacy through the federal Privacy Act 1988 (Cth), more specific privacy legislations that deal with drone collected data differ widely between state and territory jurisdictions, with Western Australia and South Australia having no specific privacy legislations (Butler 2014; Daly 2017). Mandatory data retention laws have further diminished data privacy in Australia but were passed with bipartisan support by the government in 2015, in part, through their drawing on escalating national security concerns (Suzor, Pappalardo, and McIntosh 2017). The lack of enforceable laws to protect individual’s data rights may be a barrier to public trust in technologies like aerial drones.

Work is clearly needed to describe the practice of producing and maintaining transparent innovation – particularly in cross-cultural contexts (von Schomberg 2013). This work includes not only building trust and transparency in data governance frameworks, but also trusted relationships between Indigenous people, government agencies, and researchers to improve the uptake of new technologies by local people through alleviating the risks and enhancing the benefits (e.g. Jakku et al. 2019; Maclean, Farbotko, and Robinson 2019). In cross-cultural contexts such as Kakadu, building trust to negotiate new ways of understanding and monitoring the environment can be complex to navigate. The past and recent racial and power relations can influence why certain views and knowledge systems are empowered and reproduced or not. As various Indigenous scholars have highlighted, special care is needed to ensure Indigenous people are not only involved in research framing, activities and impact but also feel culturally safe to do so (Martin and Mirraboopa 2003; Kwaymullina 2016).

While these concerns are warranted, new technologies do offer rich technical possibilities for environmental decision-making (Anderson and Gaston 2013; Wich and Koh 2018). Drones have the capacity to produce increasingly accurate and precise wildlife and habitat monitoring data, allowing for more informed and proactive environmental management (Gonzalez et al. 2016; Hodgson et al. 2018). Additionally, drones can produce accurate and replicable data at larger scales than on-ground assessments (Lyons et al. 2019); access remote or previously inaccessible areas (Inman et al. 2019); capture dynamic visual footage (Rees et al. 2018); decentralise data acquisition (Koh and Wich 2012); and provide employment benefits and training for local people (Vargas-Ramirez and Paneque-Gálvez 2019). Their application for environmental management is profound, particularly over large areas where the vehicle or personnel access is difficult, dangerous or detrimental (Nowak, Dziób, and Bogawski 2019).

Indigenous people often see possibilities in digital technologies, including the ways in which they can support their work of ‘using whatever resources come to hand in the work of regenerating clan and place as one, so as to ensure the continued health and well-being of both the land and the people’ (Verran and Christie 2007, 215). The inclusion of Indigenous voices in the co-design of new technologies and their ethics could ensure the way in which local knowledge is used and governed drives the way it is collected for technological decision-making. The inclusion of Indigenous voices could also improve the likelihood of the benefits of technology being realised through dualistic framings of RI principles that enable technological and Indigenous innovation to be shared, with Indigenous and non-Indigenous people collectively deciding what is deemed as relevant or irrelevant, or ethical or unethical, information and innovation.

In this paper, we present protocols that were co-designed with Jawoyn people (local Indigenous Traditional Owners of Jarrangbarnmi, which has come to also be known by some as Koolpin Gorge) to guide the purpose and practice of aerial drone monitoring of valuable habitats and species in the southern region of northern Australia’s Kakadu National Park. The aim of this work was to co-design protocols with local Indigenous people to responsibly manage the disruption caused by drones’ collecting data to monitor Indigenous lands. In the paper, we describe the work we did for it to be possible to introduce drones to Jawoyn country at Jarrangbarnmi ethically and the negotiations that occurred for Traditional Owners to authorise the flying of the drones. The negotiation and co-design of protocols so that we could use new technologies for data collection, translation, and use occurred through workshops on country in June and August 2019 and when preliminary results were complete in March 2021. In the workshops, we agreed on data management protocols, including that the drone would not collect data in or about sacred areas with restricted access.

We consider innovative solutions to the complex environmental issues on Indigenous-owned land to be those that are Indigenous-led, with an explicit consideration of local governance systems and a commitment to produce benefit for local people (see Paneque-Gálvez et al. 2017). The mobilisation of the protocols described in this paper has led to significant innovation as aerial drones were introduced to Jawoyn country ethically and responsibly through integrating the values and ethics of RI and Jawoyn knowledge sharing and stewardship practices into the design, development and application of drone monitoring to care for important habitats and species.

Indigenous-led responsible innovation in Jawoyn country and Australia’s Kakadu National Park

Jawoyn country is a large, language-defined geographical area in northern Australia, managed for at least 65,000 years through complex, holistic systems of law and responsibility, linked intrinsically between particular people and particular country (Gibson 1999). Country is an Aboriginal English term that defines place as lands, seas, people, animals, and seasons that are actively engaged in ‘nourishing’ relationships, responsibilities, and interdependencies (Rose 1996). Jawoyn country is full of stories, ancestors, sandstone gorges, waterfalls, rocky outcrops, and a significant diversity of plants and animals (Jawoyn Association 2020). Jawoyn people have secured the return of much of their country through the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 and have negotiated involvement in pastoral stations, mining, and national parks on their lands. Jawoyn people are recognised as Traditional Owners of Kakadu as their country includes Kakadu’s southern portion, including Jarrangbarnmi.

Jarrangbarnmi is in an area associated with the creator figure Bula and other creation ancestors including Bolung (rainbow serpent). Bula made the features of the landscape as he hunted across the country; after leaving his image as paintings in rock shelters, he went to live underground (Merlan and Rumsey 1982). Much of the region is classified as Buladjang (sickness country) as Bula and Bolung are powerful creation ancestors and if disturbed, could prove fatal to Jawoyn and others alike (Jawoyn Association 2020). Jawoyn people bear significant stress and social detriment if there is inappropriate interference in the vicinity of important Bula sites (Levitus 2007).

The right to speak for Jarrangbarnmi rests with particular people and is a function of age, knowledge and clan membership, with three clans – Wurrkbarbar, Jawoyn Bolmo, and Matjba – having continuous relationships to the area and maintaining primary responsibility for Jarrangbarnmi (Merlan 1992). Jawoyn Traditional Owners are responsible for caring for Jarrangbarnmi to ensure the safety and well-being of themselves (and country by extension) and visitors. Traditional Owners are also responsible for ensuring the health of country and people through the maintenance of their knowledge systems, including through passing on knowledge and practice to the next generation of Traditional Owners. Traditional Owners are careful around the sacred sites in the area, as many sites are gendered and can only be visited by Jawoyn people with rights and authority. Jarrangbarnmi also has significant environmental values and hosts a range of rare and endemic species (Parks Australia 2013). As such, the area presents a complicated convergence of creation ancestors with a resultant hub of sacred topography and meanings, which interconnect ecological and resource zones, as well as linguistic and social values (Lane and Rickson 1997).

In addition to Traditional Owners, Kakadu National Park joint managers have responsibilities to care for Jarrangbarnmi as set out in the joint management plan (Kakadu Board of Management 2016). Jarrangbarnmi falls under the purview of the Mary River Rangers, in whose district it is located. Kakadu National Park is an internationally significant landscape as a dual-listed World Heritage national park in northern Australia, jointly managed by the Federal Government and Indigenous people – known as Bininj in the north of the Park and Mungguy in the south. Bininj is a Gundjeihmi and Kunwinjku word and Mungguy is a Jawoyn word, which can both mean man, male, person or Indigenous person, depending on context. Kakadu is recognised as a ‘living Aboriginal landscape’ as Bininj/Mungguy custodianship of Kakadu has been practised for more than 65,000 years and continues today (Kakadu Board of Management 2016). Bininj/Mungguy own the land occupied by the park, which was simultaneously returned to their ownership and leased back to the government under the direction of a board of management with a Bininj/Mungguy majority (Haynes 2013). Like many protected areas around the world, joint managers in Kakadu face rapidly growing threats to significant areas and species, including challenging contemporary fire regimes (McGregor et al. 2010; Petty, DeKoninck, and Orlove 2015). These challenges require joint managers to do more with less (and at a faster pace) to sustainably manage Kakadu. It is within this unique cross-cultural context that Kakadu is managed and monitored and that this research took place.

Methods

Following a request for more Traditional Owner oversight of research projects in Kakadu, the Kakadu Indigenous Research Steering Committee (henceforth the Steering Committee) was established in March 2018. Like the Board of Management for Kakadu, Bininj/Mungguy members of the Steering Committee represent the major clan and language groups within the Kakadu region, including Jawoyn Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi (Kakadu Board of Management 2016, 31). The Steering Committee meets approximately twice yearly to provide input on research focus, methods, results, and analysis. The Steering Committee conceived of this research as an action-based project to identify Bininj/Mungguy indicators for monitoring adaptive co-management of healthy country in a national park with joint management arrangements. Jarrangbarnmi was chosen by the Steering Committee as one of the three locations which they considered a priority, emphasising that indicator trials at each site should be linked to management activities such as fire, weed or feral animal management.²

The research for this paper was undertaken in June 2019, when the co-authors camped at Jarrangbarnmi for a two-day workshop on country with fourteen Jawoyn people, which included five senior decision-makers and their family members, plus two Jawoyn Rangers working for Kakadu, the Kakadu Indigenous Research Coordinator, one Kakadu Staff member and five non-Indigenous research team members. Protocols were developed based on workshop discussions and information collected through interviews with Traditional Owners conducted by their young people. The non-Indigenous research team members worked with the young people by sitting with them before the interviews to think through research questions to ask their Elders and did informal training with them in how to use the video camera and sound recorder.

Research results and analysis were checked during a subsequent monitoring trip to Jarrangbarnmi in August 2019, attended by eleven Jawoyn people, including five senior Traditional Owners, the Kakadu Indigenous Research Coordinator, Kakadu’s Cultural Heritage Officer, and the five non-Indigenous research team members. This paper was then co-authored during a workshop with Traditional Owners in Jabiru in October 2020 and a workshop in March 2021 at the Mary River Ranger Station. At that workshop, we also looked at the outputs of the drone collected data and discussed how this information could be visualised alongside other sources of evidence to care for the health of Jarrangbarnmi, including the qualitative data collected through videos and quantitative data collected by national park Rangers and Staff. Through the co-authorship workshops, senior Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi were able to check the results, contribute to analysis, and give authorisation for publication. Final authorisation was confirmed during a final monitoring trip to Jarrangbarnmi in July 2021.

Results

Co-designed protocols for introducing technology to country

Protocols were co-developed on country by researchers, Traditional Owners, and Rangers that recognise Indigenous cultural responsibilities for knowledge sharing and stewardship of country and were used to inform the application of digital technologies at Jarrangbarnmi, including data collection and use. The protocols are outlined in detail below.

1. Empowering Indigenous governance

This protocol ensured that the right Traditional Owners with authority over the lands, from which drones were collecting data, were leading decision-making processes. In Kakadu, this was achieved through the establishment of a broad strategic Steering Committee and through ensuring that the right Elders were leading workshops and were present on country when drones were deployed. Our commitment to enabling Indigenous governance through working collaboratively on country with the right Jawoyn for Jarrangbarnmi and adhering to cultural protocols, so that Traditional Owner obligations and responsibilities were met, is consistent with other collaborative efforts in Kakadu. As Marshall et al. (2020, 207) articulate with regard to enabling Indigenous stewardship of rock art conservation processes, this approach

is consistent with caring for country strategies; and ensures that all involved will be able to realise their responsibilities to look after the cultural intricacies of the sites, while simultaneously owning, understanding, enacting, monitoring, maintaining and managing scientific conservation programmes.

At the outset, the Steering Committee chose Jarrangbarnmi as a case study, including because it represents one of the three key biocultural landscapes in Kakadu (Kakadu Board of Management 2016). Prior to this project, Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi had raised concerns about the use of drones in the Park for a variety of reasons, including anxieties about their potential impact on sensitive cultural sites. The non-Indigenous research team members were aware of these concerns and were also interested in the practical possibilities that might emerge from co-designing Indigenous-led drone methodologies, including for environmental monitoring, adaptive co-management, and local training and employment opportunities. The research team planned to approach the discussion regarding drone use with care, on country, and through a process controlled by Traditional Owners; we would abandon any methods that were not endorsed by Traditional Owners.

On the first day, the appropriate senior Traditional Owner opened the workshop by welcoming the group to Jawoyn country and described how we would all work together at Jarrangbarnmi:

We need to work together with the scientists and the Traditional Owners and the new generation and the Park people; we’ll work with the three clan groups to fix our area. (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jarrangbarnmi 25/06/201)

Those, who had not visited Jarrangbarnmi before, were taken to Koolpin Creek, where Traditional Owners introduced them to the ancestors in language to ensure they would be safe on country. After the welcome to country, a young participant took instructions from Traditional Owners to draw a map of Jarrangbarnmi on a large sheet of paper set out on the dusty ground, circled by camp chairs; the map identified the boundaries of where we could and could not work. Traditional Owners identified threats to the health of Jarrangbarnmi, including hot fires. They determined that to monitor the health of Jarrangbarnmi we would monitor anjok (wattle trees, Acacia dimidiata) which are important to Jawoyn people, before and after early season, cool fire management. Over the next two days, we returned to the map as people had time to mull over the project.

(2)	Developing ethical and trusted research relationships

This protocol ensured the research team took the time to be transparent and collaborative in describing how digital technologies could be responsibly co-designed and applied to understand management actions to care for Jarrangbarnmi. This protocol also focused on making sure researchers adhered to on-ground cultural protocols and the CARE principles for Indigenous data sovereignty, so that Elders could direct if and how data were collected, analysed, shared and used (see GIDA 2020). Across Kakadu, data collection and sharing protocols have varied between groups based on Traditional Owner priorities and aspirations for how data can benefit their efforts to care for the health of country.

At Jarrangbarnmi, the research team showed Traditional Owners and Rangers of technologies and we discussed their possible uses: participatory video, for young people to record Traditional Owners and learn about monitoring healthy country; motion sensor cameras and sound recorders, for ‘seeing’ and ‘hearing’ country when people are not there; and drones, for collecting aerial photos to monitor changes to country before and after management actions.

Traditional Owners raised their concerns regarding the drone, including that the user might ‘see’ restricted sacred sites, including gendered sites; or sensitive information might be recorded in an open-access database; or Traditional Owners might be removed from decision-making processes on country. As one Traditional Owner asserted:

It’s alright that you bring that technology, but you need to make sure you bring TOs [Traditional Owners] with you when you’re setting it up so they’re still on country, learning and listening to country. (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jarrangbarnmi 25/06/2019)

The research team talked through each technology, in turn, including their purpose, area of operation, and data collection and storage. Regarding the drone, the research team demonstrated how the area identified by Traditional Owners as appropriate to be monitored could be programmed into the drone and it would fly corresponding transects and nowhere else. The legal regulations for drone use were outlined, including that the drone remains in line of sight and go no higher than 100 metres.

These discussions led to the co-design of rules for technology use on country, to ensure that the cultural protocols that Jawoyn people follow to ensure Jarrangbarnmi is cared for properly and responsibly could be translated into the protocols we would follow for using the drone. We also discussed what information would be made available to inform joint management decisions (or not), and how on-going free, prior and informed consent would be negotiated as data collected from the drone were analysed and translated throughout the research process. The co-designed rules for technology use on country included: (1) Traditional Owners would always delegate an Elder to be present on country when monitoring technologies were deployed; (2) Traditional Owners would determine the area that the drone monitored and choose where to install the on-ground monitoring technologies (cameras and sound recorders); and (3) young people would take the videos of Traditional Owners talking about monitoring healthy country, to help engage them with their country and Elders. As a Traditional Owner said on a subsequent trip:

This is a very special place. It’s a man place, it’s got protocols. … We do have protocols. Look, that’s my nephew there, he has to be here, he protects this site for men. You gotta go certain height [with the drone]. … Sometimes that man say to other people ‘Don’t take the drone too high, because of the sacred sites.’ (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jarrangbarnmi 14/07/2021)

The curation of data was also negotiated, which included Jawoyn collaborators providing on-going input and consent when, where, and how the research team could fly the drone over Jawoyn country. This process of negotiation has ensured Jawoyn Traditional Owners have been empowered to assert their rights to control their data and protect it against exploitation, misinterpretation, and misuse (see Rainie et al. 2019).

The collaboration at Jarrangbarnmi has required us to re-work mainstream concepts surrounding RI, which push for open-source data and transparency (Owen and Pansera 2019), and instead draw on the CARE principles for Indigenous data governance – Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility and Ethics – that recognise the need to ensure Indigenous groups benefit from data and its use (GIDA 2020). In Indigenous contexts, RI needs to acknowledge that Indigenous knowledge is not free and available to all and locally relevant governance systems are needed to ensure data collection, use, and access recognises gendered, sacred and place-based Indigenous laws that determine if and how knowledge is shared (Rose 1996; Woodward et al. 2020). In practice, this means that drone collected data need to have provenance and traceability components that allow Jawoyn Elders to decide if, when, and how these data can be collected and used. Curation of the data into a database and its interface with Jawoyn and joint management practices is a priority for our on-going collaboration and remains focused on how Traditional Owners, researchers and Kakadu Rangers and staff can use and negotiate available sources of data to improve the health of country on Bininj/Mungguy lands.

(3)	Enabling on-going Indigenous-led technological innovation

This protocol focused on ensuring the benefits of digital technologies were accessible and usable to local Indigenous people. We prioritised resources and paid attention to enabling Bininj and Mungguy to be employed as co-researchers in the project, supported Traditional Owners and their families to be on country when the research was done, and utilised communication tools like videos and interviews to ensure that why and how this technology was going to be used was understood, not only by those on country with the research team but also beyond to family members who were not on country at the time (see: https://vimeo.com/359448474). At Jarrangbarnmi, this protocol ensured that Jawoyn were able to tangibly access the drones, as well as the benefits of innovation, which have been translated back to communities through co-researcher employment and skills development.

At Jarrangbarnmi, Jawoyn people were paid, either as senior authorities or co-researchers. Elders and young people then had an opportunity to fly the drone and interrogate how it worked. Many Jawoyn, particularly the young people, became excited to learn how to fly the drone themselves and expressed a desire to do training so they could learn more about how it and the other technologies worked:

We’d like to learn more, especially learn about that computer and using that tablet now, and it tells you which area, where to go, how far you can go. Definitely worth using and learning how to use some of these. Get a ticket, just like a pilot, so we can learn how to operate some of these [drones]. (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jarrangbarnmi 25/06/2019)

We have started an on-country training programme that has been described as important because of the possible employment opportunities for Jawoyn people, including in research projects or other industries doing environmental and cultural monitoring and maintenance. The team is committed to co-designing training courses, to be delivered on Jawoyn country and other important areas in Kakadu, to build local peoples’ capacity to use new technologies to monitor adaptive co-management in an ethical and responsible way. As a Traditional Owner said during a trip in 2019:

To get young people on country, to get young people involved, you mob doing a better job than anybody else, because media, this kind of stuff is for the young people. That’s the only way to get them out on country, to show them things that they can use. (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jarrangbarnmi 15/08/2019)

On-going Indigenous-led technological innovation is concerned with making sure data collected makes sense and is useful to local people in supporting their efforts to care for country. At the workshop at the Mary River Ranger Station in March 2021, data access protocols were discussed, and the data outputs collected by the drone were shared and tested to ensure their usability and usefulness.

Lessons from co-designed protocols for negotiating and navigating the ethical use of drones on country

The protocols outlined in this paper ensured that responsibility for the disruption and opportunities offered by the introduction of drones for monitoring was negotiated and shared by Jawoyn Traditional Owners and other joint managers of this World Heritage-listed national park. Table 1 provides a summary of the protocols, how they were applied at Jarrangbarnmi, and the lessons learnt for ensuring Indigenous cultural responsibilities for knowledge and country are considered in Responsible Innovation. While these protocols were developed on Jawoyn country and the specifics would vary in other places, the over-arching lessons learnt at Jarrangbarnmi could enable responsible Indigenous-led innovation in other biocultural landscapes.

Table 1. Lessons learnt for RI from co-developed protocols for introducing technology to country.

Protocol	Description	Example from Jarrangbarnmi	Lessons learnt for RI
Empowering Indigenous governance	The right people are giving consent to where and why drones are collecting data on country	Cultural authority and consent was achieved through a Kakadu-wide Steering Committee and enabling on-ground Traditional Owner governance practices, ensuring research and innovation practice was culturally appropriate and safe	Cultural authority and safety requires researchers and innovators to recognise their work as occurring on Indigenous biocultural landscapes and under Indigenous law
Developing ethical and trusted research relationships	Researchers are spending time ensuring the way they work and collect data are done responsibly	Ethical research partnerships were developed through transparent research practices which included describing and demonstrating how digital technologies could be co-designed and applied to monitor the environment, and through implementation of the CARE principles of data governance, which informed data collection and analytical efforts	Informed and on-going consent must always be prioritised and negotiated for innovation to be responsibly applied on Indigenous-owned and governed lands
Enabling on-going Indigenous-led technological innovation	Technological innovation on Indigenous lands is leading to local benefits, improved access to digital innovation, and useful and useable data	Traditional Owners were resourced to co-design the technological innovation, supported to be on country with their families, and are leading the co-design of an on-country training programme to ensure access to and benefit from digital technologies	Tangible access to innovation is imperative to ensure monitoring technologies are accessible and usable for Indigenous people and are producing culturally safe and useful information about their lands

Co-developing and following the protocols to introduce new technologies to Jawoyn country resulted in several additional and important outcomes. Ethical research practices were followed, with the Steering Committee deciding on the broad aims of the project, which were to identify and monitor Bininj/Mungguy indicators of healthy country to guide adaptive co-management of this joint managed national park. The specific aim explored through this paper – to find a way for new and disruptive monitoring technologies like drones to be introduced to country in a way that Indigenous people would consider responsible – was co-developed with and authorised by Jawoyn senior authorities during the workshops on country. Workshops were hosted on Jawoyn country, with each activity and discussion led by appropriate Traditional Owners. Jawoyn people were employed as senior authorities and co-researchers to choose the research approach and methods, which included enabling the young people to interview their Elders about appropriate ways to govern new technologies on country. The efficacy of our collaborative research practices and impact were evaluated after the workshop on country, as they have been throughout the project (for details, see Robinson et al. 2021). Through these research practices and commitments, Jawoyn governance practices have been respected and enabled.

In addition, through the intellectual collaboration of Jawoyn Traditional Owners, Rangers and non-Indigenous scientists, guidelines for the research emerged including: a commitment to mobilise Jawoyn culture through monitoring and evaluation practices; to have monitoring of caring for country activities done and taught by proper authorities; and to avoid sacred knowledge of country and culture. These features are reflected in other collaborative efforts in the Northern Territory like the Yolŋu Languages and Culture Program at Charles Darwin University (see Hayashi 2020) and are respectful of kin-country relationships and joint management responsibilities through developing ethical and trusted research relationships that are enabling Indigenous-led technological innovation on country.

Finally, the commitment to on-going Indigenous and technological innovation has ensured a vision for long-term benefit for Jawoyn people despite this being a finite research project and monitoring programme. Traditional Owners at each case site and the Steering Committee have regularly reviewed the research practices and activities throughout each phase of the project, including how well the research team has shared science with Traditional Owners and Rangers and delivered benefits to local people (see Robinson et al. 2021). The value of this inclusive approach has been consistently referenced in the independent evaluations, for example:

We’ve worked hard to build this relationship and we want to keep working with you. This [Kakadu] NESP team brings Bininj to life here, they feel good about themselves because you motivate them. You did a good job; our young people are happy, and I want to see it keep going so we can keep motivating our young people. (Jawoyn Traditional Owner, Jabiru 31/10/19)

The lessons learnt for RI from our approach to co-designing protocols to ensure the ethical use of technology on country include working on country with the right clan groups, under Traditional Owner authority, to ensure monitoring technologies are accessible and usable for Indigenous people and are producing culturally appropriate, safe and useful information about their lands.

Discussion

Extending human-centred design and ethics for Indigenous-led responsible innovation

The accelerating pace of emerging technologies like drones is producing new and agile ways of doing environmental decision-making (Floreano and Wood 2015; Ivoševic et al. 2015; López and Mulero-Pázmány 2019). The increased use of and attention to drones has led to a widespread debate about their responsible design and application. Arguments for responsibility are often framed around notions of ‘human-centred design,’ where researchers and designers develop technologies in cooperation with potential users, so that products match users’ needs and preferences, and ‘value-sensitive design’ where ethical considerations and social impacts are incorporated into technological design (Cenci and Cawthorne 2020). However, in cross-cultural settings like Kakadu, ‘human-centred design’ needs to be expanded to include Indigenous ethics and protocols to ensure responsible innovation recognises Indigenous knowledge and governance. It is to this challenge that we now turn.

As the use of technologies for environmental monitoring has become more pervasive, there have been calls to establish guidelines for technological systems to remain human-centric, ‘serving humanity’s values and ethical principles’ (IEEE 2019, 2). Drones raise specific ethical issues for RI around human control and responsibility, driven by a (legitimate) fear of diminished human control leading to undesirable consequences for which no one is responsible (Clarke 2014). Arguments have been made for drones to be developed and operated in a way that is beneficial to people and the environment, beyond simply reaching functional goals and addressing technical problems (Cawthorne and Robbins-van Wynsberghe 2020). This has led to discussions about ‘meaningful human control,’ including ensuring humans remain in-the-loop of drone development and use (Santoni de Sio and van den Hoven 2018).

Most approaches to ethics and responsibility for technological innovation, therefore, call for the prioritisation of the flourishing of humans over all else, with human well-being the goal in technology development (e.g. IEEE 2019). Importantly though, these efforts do not challenge the fundamental anthropocentrism of Western science and technology, and ‘hence none of them offer truly radical ways of considering these new entities’ (Lewis et al. 2020, 7). Lewis et al. (2020) argue that bringing Indigenous knowledge systems into technology development conversations could illuminate alternative approaches to designing and using technology ethically, based on relational paradigms and mutual respect that are embedded in Indigenous relationships with kin and country. The co-designed protocols that emerged from our Indigenous-led work in northern Australia are significant because dominant frameworks of RI have rarely been designed with Indigenous relational ethics in mind (Ludwig and Macnaghten 2020, 38).

Our experience of designing and applying innovation from an ethical position that prioritised Indigenous perspectives, values, and concerns raised profound questions about the ethics and practices needed to bring Indigenous governance into the loop of innovation design thinking (see Table 2). While Indigenous stewardship of their lands and seas is intimately about having people on country, ‘unmanned’ drones are fundamentally about an absence (Cawthorne and Robbins-van Wynsberghe 2020). This tension was managed at Jarrangbarnmi by ensuring Traditional Owners chose the area the drone surveyed and were on country while the drone was being used, with young Jawoyn participants operating the drones. Like much of Australia, at Jarrangbarnmi primary responsibility for country is determined according to kin links and clan affiliations (Christie 2009). Jawoyn people with responsibilities to care for clan estates are the key decision-makers in the planning and management of those areas: if you want to make decisions about the story of this place, or this totem, or this ancestral connection or event, you need to talk to the right person – the owner or the ‘manager,’ the person with the right to make those particular representations. The introduction of innovative technologies to country, therefore, needed to respect this governance system and bring it into the loop of the drone design and application.

Table 2. Enabling Indigenous governance of innovation design.

Innovation tension	Solution at Jarrangbarnmi
Indigenous stewardship of lands & seas is about having people on country // ‘unmanned’ drones fundamentally about absence	Traditional Owners chose the area the drone surveyed, were on country while the drone was being used, with young Jawoyn participants operating the drones
Responsibility and decision-making for country determined according to kin links and clan affiliations // AI-driven drone decision-making determined according to trained models that convert photos into metrics	Introduction and use of drones respected and incorporated Jawoyn governance system for decision-making, with the right people consulted and applying technology

Currently accessible drone technology – small short-range devices – has made it possible to ensure Traditional Owner authority over introducing drones for environmental monitoring in Kakadu. However, the scale and pace of development in future remote-sensing technologies like drones is raising increasingly pressing questions for how Indigenous authority can be maintained as they are applied on and above their lands and seas. Described as ‘the promise and peril of innovation’ (Choi-Fitzpatrick 2014, 20), drone technology is developing rapidly, allowing for longer battery lives and the ability to carry high performance cameras, generating infinitely portable and reproducible images that can be copied, distributed, and stored with increasing ease and decreasing cost. Drones are now able to be operated across vast distances, by pilots located in different cities or countries, controlled by satellite communications, and taking photographs and videos at increasingly higher spatial and temporal resolutions. To this end, Choi-Fitzpatrick (2014) argues that drones are relocating the boundary between what is public and what is private, as camera-equipped drones move their line of sight to the air. Country that has had its access regulated by Indigenous authorities for thousands of years is under increasing threat of being forced into the public sphere, subject to surveillance by remotely operated drones.

Conclusion

This paper highlights the importance of incorporating Indigenous concepts of cultural responsibility for knowledge sharing and stewardship of country into the co-design and application of digital innovations. The importance of maintaining cultural responsibility for knowledge and country in innovation was explored in the context of introducing drones to collect data that could be used for improved environmental decision-making. Considering Indigenous cultural responsibilities in innovation design and application ensured that key areas of disruption were identified and negotiated, including: negotiating where technologies were used to minimise impacts on important places within Indigenous people’s biocultural landscapes; respecting Indigenous data sovereignty rights throughout the data life cycle; and ensuring local Indigenous people were benefiting from new technologies and ideas, not only through employment and training but also more broadly through improved digital inclusion.

Traditional Owners are rightly concerned about ensuring continued Indigenous governance of what drones ought or ought not to see, and where drones ought or ought not to go, when they are increasingly remotely operated and Traditional Owners are not present on the lands and seas being surveyed. To date, there are no protocols developed for this type of innovation, because innovations are generally considered under ethics and laws that do not account for Indigenous modes of stewardship and governance of their lands and seas (Lewis et al. 2020). The protocols described here of empowering Indigenous governance, developing ethical and trusted research relationships, and enabling on-going Indigenous-led technological innovation, were co-designed through a practical on-ground research project and provide a pathway to ensure Indigenous cultural responsibilities and ethical practices for country and knowledge are embedded in Indigenous-led digital innovation development and application.

While drones do offer new and innovative ways of monitoring the environment and can provide benefit to Indigenous people, in their excitement and haste to develop technologies that remotely look at country, scientists and innovators must not forget the very fundamental and grounded principles of Indigenous stewardship of their country. Ensuring Indigenous governance and respecting kin-country relationships and joint management responsibilities through developing ethical and trusted research relationships for future innovations will be key to their on-going acceptance and use by Indigenous managers of some of the world’s most important biocultural diversity.

Acknowledgements

We extend our sincere gratitude to Jawoyn Traditional Owners of Jarrangbarnmi for leading this work, welcoming us to their country and trusting us with this important story. We acknowledge all the Traditional Owners of Kakadu National Park who have worked with us throughout this project. We thank Dr Taryn Kong, Dr Justine Lacey and the two anonymous reviewers whose thoughtful contributions greatly improved this paper. This project received human ethics clearance from CSIRO’s Social Science Human Research Ethics Committee (CSSHREC) reference number 050/18 and reciprocal clearance from Charles Darwin University’s Human Research Ethics Committee (HREC) reference number H18055.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Government's National Environmental Science Program through the Northern Australia Environmental Resources Hub and the CSIRO-CDU Responsible Innovation Future Science Platform Collaboration.

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Mairi Macdonald

Jennifer Mairi Macdonald is a CDU-CSIRO Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the College of Indigenous Futures, Education and the Arts at Charles Darwin University and the Responsible Innovation Future Science Platform (RI FSP) at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

Cathy J. Robinson

Cathy J. Robinson is Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO and project leader of the collaboration on Bininj/Mungguy healthy country indicators in Kakadu National Park.

Justin Perry

Justin Perry is Research Manager at the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA).

Maria Lee

Maria Lee is a Jawoyn Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi and a member of the Bininj/Mungguy Research Steering Committee.

Ryan Barrowei

Ryan Barrowei is a Jawoyn Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi and a member of the Bininj/Mungguy Research Steering Committee.

Bessie Coleman

Bessie Coleman is a Jawoyn Traditional Owners for Jarrangbarnmi and a member of the Bininj/Mungguy Research Steering Committee.

Joe Markham

Joe Markham is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Aaron Barrowei

Aaron Barrowei is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Billy Markham

Billy Markham is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Jermaine Douglas

Jermaine Douglas is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Jatbula Hunter

Jatbula Hunter is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Elijah Gayoso

Elijah Gayoso is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Tyron Ahwon

Tyron Ahwon is a Jawoyn Traditional Owner for Jarrangbarnmi.

Dennis Cooper

Dennis Cooper is the Kakadu Indigenous Research Coordinator with the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) and the Northern Land Council (NLC).

Kadeem May

Kadeem May is Senior Cultural Heritage Officer in the Country & Culture Section in Kakadu National Park.

Samantha Setterfield

Samantha Setterfield is Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University Of Western Australia (UWA).

Michael Douglas

Michael Douglas is Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at UWA and Hub Leader of the NESP’s Northern Australian Environmental Resources Hub and the upcoming Resilient Landscapes Hub.

Notes

1 In this paper, we use the abbreviation RI which is also often referred to as Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI); see Owen and Pansera (2019) for a description of the distinction between RI and RRI. In the Australian context, RI has been primarily taken up by our research and innovation institutions (see Herington, Coates, and Lacey 2019; Lacey, Coates, and Herington 2020).

2 More information on the project and other case study sites can be found at: https://www.nespnorthern.edu.au/projects/nesp/healthy-country-indicators/.