{"id":87,"date":"2023-07-15T09:19:51","date_gmt":"2023-07-15T09:19:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/engineeringwithcountry\/chapter\/governance\/"},"modified":"2026-03-16T13:46:37","modified_gmt":"2026-03-16T13:46:37","slug":"governance","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/libraryresources.nse.org.ng\/engineeringwithcountry\/chapter\/governance\/","title":{"raw":"Governance in projects","rendered":"Governance in projects"},"content":{"raw":"One of the significant factors to emerge from the consultations in Austrlia over improving land management, has been the greater understanding of consultation techniques. Our Knowledge, Our Way in Caring for Country provides a resource for ongoing projects with community:\n\n[embed]https:\/\/vimeo.com\/442907804[\/embed]\n\nAvailable from https:\/\/www.csiro.au\/ourknowledgeourway. Licenced under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0<\/a>\n\nTo run First Nations projects with community, we need to work with the existing organisations and the local people of the area where we work. In terms of engagement with community there are two important groups:\n\n1. Local Aboriginal Lands Council<\/a>\n\nThere is funding for Aboriginal people to support their communities through\u00a0the\u00a0Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983.\u00a0<\/em>This is distributed through the about 120 Local Aboriginal Lands Councils (LALCs). These are elected representatives for Aboriginal people in their region.\n\nThese Councils manage the finances to support all Aboriginal people in their area, not just those who are traditionally from that area.\u00a0The services they manage include housing, legal affairs, employment, training and property acquisition and management.\n\n2.\u00a0Reconciliation\u00a0Australia<\/a>\n\nReconciliation Australia was established in 2001 and is the lead body for reconciliation in the nation. They are an independent not-for-profit organisation that promotes and facilitates reconciliation by building relationships, respect and trust between the wider Australian community and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples\n\nThere are many local Reconciliation\u00a0groups<\/a> that provide links between the Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities. They are also a good point of contact with community people.\n

History of Governance<\/h2>\n
Aboriginal people lived in Australia for over 80,000 years, During this time they established genomicaly distinct groups of people around different landscapes of Australia. The paper by the Aboriginal geneticist Ray Tobler \"<\/span>Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia<\/a>\" published in Nature wrote about how his team worked with hair samples collected around Australia in the 1900's. The samples included data on where they were collected from. This provide the resources to verify the genetic make up of people of different areas before major colonisation of much of Australia.<\/div>\n
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This work showed that\u00a0Aboriginal people lived in specific regions of Australia\u00a0for 45-50,000 years. No mass invasions, forced\u00a0migrations or land disputes.<\/div>\n
\n\n[caption id=\"attachment_86\" align=\"alignnone\" width=\"952\"]\"The Figure 1. With Permission from Tobler et al (2017). Aboriginal mitogenomes reveal 50,000 years of regionalism in Australia<\/a>. Licensed for adaption and re-use under CC BY-NC 4.0<\/a>.[\/caption]\n\n<\/div>\n
Bruce Pascoe in his book Dark Emu describes the governance that enabled this settled life style, and work by the philosopher Helen Verran (2008, 2022) also discusses this. Aboriginal people developed a complex governance system that ensured that people came together regularly to share stories, marry out of family and heal social wounds. This system was run by a group of elders, each with different expertise and all working for consensus, which is not an easy process. <\/span>The system was a form of flat\u00a0management that allows hierarchy, but within each level, people\u00a0have\u00a0more control of their life<\/span>.<\/div>\n

Governance styles<\/h2>\nIf the Voice were to be set up in Australia, it would be the first government funded participatory democracy organisation in Australia. The Voice was designed with layers of representation from local, to regional to national, where any national representative also attends, report to, and listens to, their regional and local groups.\n\nAboriginal\u00a0 culture has always been participatory. The elders that meet to organise the corroborees are a group of people with vastly different expertise (totems) who decide on a common path forward in caring for country, that enabled all animals, birds, plants and resources to flourish in balance.\n\nIn European society the notion that those affected by legislation should be involved in the drawing up of that legislation has been slow to grow. As a result we see repeated policies and platforms overturned as unworkable and not good for most. In software development the grown of participatory research arose from the realisation that the software being developed by those who know the technology did not suit those who merely used it. Hence more had to be done to engage the users, right from the initial design.\n\nThis approach is being taken up in architecture, and the growth of tools for online sharing of designs and gathering and analysing feedback are flourishing. We need to manage users expectations, not by negating them, but showing users what is possible or not, and working to find compromises where necessary.\n\nIn our projects, Participatory Action Research<\/a> (PAR) is part of any development with First Nations communities, as the source of issues and the possible solutions will only be known to community members, not to those with different priorities, values and experiences. In the recent COVID crisis, First Nations people were forcibly moved from urban areas back to their communities, to 'protect them'. Due to distrust of government, the communities were ready to get up and all move to urban areas, they understood from this forced move that living in communities must be harmful. By elders and leaders demanding to be informed, the health message started to be delivered to community leaders, not just the health clinic workers, and the community started taking control of the messaging. As a result, very few First Nations people in the NT died from COVID.\n\nFirst Nations are more familiar with working in this way and will always guide projects to consider this process as important. Similarly other groups are realising it is import to consider the great human and physical environment.\n

Learning Focus<\/h2>\nThere are various case studies in software that illustrate the failure of developments without client involvements and the history of Participatory Design<\/a> (PD) in Human Computer Interaction.\u00a0 Students can run a design project using PAR or PD so they become used to the steps involved, and reflect on the changes to their design that result from this work\n\nWe try and invite members of the client community in to assess such projects done for<\/strong> a community, so that students start to realise that design with<\/strong> community is different. This has an advantage as only one session will be required for the students to get feedback on their presentations. In designing with First Nations communities, the situation is so different to what students tend to assume, this point is brought home easily.<\/span>\n
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Assessment<\/strong><\/p>\n\n<\/header>\n

\n\nThis understanding of group governance and consultation with community can be assessed as part of the rubric of a student's design report, or as a reflection after meeting with community. Again this reflection can be part of the report, in what did we change from the community meeting.\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \n
\n\nReferences<\/strong>\n\nVerran, H.<\/span>\u00a0(2008<\/span>).\u00a0Knowledge systems of aboriginal Australians: Questions and answers arising in a databasing project<\/span>. In\u00a0Encyclopaedia of the history of science, technology, and medicine in non-Western cultures<\/span>.\u00a0Dordrecht, NL<\/span>: Springer.\n\nVerran, H (2022) The Duality of Metric Concepts of Contemporary Indigenous Australian Lifeways: Kinship Categories and Numbers. In Cat Kutay, Elyssebeth Leigh, Juliana Kaya Prpic, Lyndon Ormond-Parker (Eds) Indigenous Engineering for an Enduring Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing\n\nKutay, C. and\u00a0 Walsh S. (2022) Wellbeing: A Process of Software Participatory Action Research. In Cat Kutay, Elyssebeth Leigh, Juliana Kaya Prpic, Lyndon Ormond-Parker (Eds) Indigenous Engineering for an Enduring Culture. Cambridge Scholars Publishing\n\n<\/div>\n ","rendered":"

One of the significant factors to emerge from the consultations in Austrlia over improving land management, has been the greater understanding of consultation techniques. Our Knowledge, Our Way in Caring for Country provides a resource for ongoing projects with community:<\/p>\n