Research team: Jon Altman, Geoff Buchanan

Project status: Current

Research type: CAEPR research

Jon Altman has been awarded an ARC Australian Professorial Fellowship to undertake this ARC supported research project ‘Hybrid economic futures for remote Indigenous Australia: Linking poverty reduction and natural resource management'. The project provides the theoretical underpinning for the major project supported by the Sidney Myer Fund ‘People on Country, Healthy Landscapes and Indigenous Economic Futures'.

Project overview:

In general policy makers and the dominant policy discourse see productive employment and enterprise opportunity in the public or private sectors of the economy. Such an economic development model has shortcomings either where there is a deficiency of such opportunity or where there is a vibrant customary or non-market sector. Recognising this, the hybrid economy framework includes three sectors, customary, market and state rather than the more usual two. The model is conceptualized as a Venn diagram four overlapping segments to reflect the articulations or interlinkages between sectors and the mobility of people between these sectors. The hybrid economy framework seeks to provide a circuit breaker to thinking about entrenched Indigenous Australian under-development and dependence in remote Australia. This research examines the potential for developing a diverse array of productive possibilities include payment for provision of environmental services, but also in the arts sector, in wildlife harvesting, in carbon abatement activities and so on. The aim is to enhance choice and possibility to enhance livelihoods for Indigenous Australians living on the massive Indigenous estate that now covers over 20 per cent of the continent. The model recognises that some might seek livelihood in private mainstream employment or in the public sector, but others might prefer opportunity to also engage in customary activity.

Geoff Buchanan, PhD scholar, is conducting an ethnographic study over 2009-2012 as part of this project with the working title ‘Country, culture, economy: Challenges to development in remote Indigenous Australia'. Geoff will conduct fieldwork at three sites in remote areas of Western Australia, Northern Territory and Queensland.