This seminar examines the different meanings attached to empowerment by the Cape York Welfare Reform Trial in Aboriginal Australia and the Community Development Agency Development Education Training program in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Both programs seek to address deteriorating social conditions, and see passive dependence as a primary cause. Both aim to rebuild social norms through restoration of Indigenous authority and access to the means to have independent income. Colonisation forms a common context for their use of the language of empowerment. While the Cape York trial derives its principles from the Cape York Institute’s interpretation of Amartya Sen, the Community Development Agency’s approach is founded on local interpretation of a body of Pacific community development practice with roots in Freirian liberation and human need. This practice dates back to the Solomon Islands in the 1980s. Based on the Cape York Trial Evaluation Report (2012) and recent post-doctoral field-work undertaken with the Community Development Agency, the seminar compares and contrasts the two interpretations of empowering praxis.

Dr Richard Barcham has 30 years experience as a community development practitioner in the Pacific and Indigenous Australia. He was awarded his doctorate in 2012 for his  thesis Theorising empowerment practice from the Pacific and Indigenous Australia. This seminar is based on subsequent application of his thesis work in Papua New Guinea.