I recently attended an Indigenous Governance workshop in AIATSIS in Canberra, at which I was a dual representative of the GroundUp team and the Tangentyere Council Research Hub. The workshop was attended by around 40 people, including representatives from academia, the government (federal and state/territory), Indigenous NGOs (most large, some small), and Indigenous private enterprise.

By way of context  the workshop was, for the most part, like any other: we had facilitators, we had presentations, followed by questions, we did small group work followed by reports back, we chatted with other participants in the breaks. So in a sense nothing much to see here. However I was watching and trying to pay attention to who gets to speak (and for how long) and what is the impact of their contribution. I guess in a sense one of the things I was trying to see was ‘who are the decision makers’ and how do they become them- i.e. what are the social processes at work in which some people emerge as the authorised voices? I was then interested in whether these authorised voices enabled other conversations to take place, or whether they constrained them- setting limits on what was able to be legitimately discussed.

I am interested in this as the work we are doing in the IGLDP is looking at who gets to talk and what are the vehicles through which they are able to talk. We are finding in Ntaria that in many situations things are not working to peoples satisfaction- i.e. the wrong people seem to be driving the conversations, or people do not feel that they have the vehicles through which they are able to be heard.

However my question for others is have they experienced situations in which the governance they saw emerging either constrained or enabled other conversations to take place? I.e. was the function of the governance that emerged to reinforce itself? If so do people have any thoughts about what this might mean in the longer term?