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The importance of process in social impact assessment: Ethics, methods and process for cross-cultural engagement Richard Howitt a Department of Human Geography , Macquarie University , NSW, 2109, Australia Published online: 07 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Richard Howitt (2005) The importance of process in social impact assessment: Ethics, methods and process for cross-cultural engagement, Ethics, Place & Environment: A Journal of Philosophy & Geography, 8:2, 209-221, DOI: 10.1080/13668790500237336

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Ethics Place and Environment, Vol. 8, No. 2, 209–221, June 2005

The Importance of Process in Social Impact Assessment: Ethics, Methods and Process for Cross-cultural Engagement

RICHARD HOWITT Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University, NSW, 2109, Australia

ABSTRACT Social impact assessment (SIA) presents an important opportunity to draw cross-cultural encounters arising from project-based development efforts into wider procedures of engagement and negotiation that might address the imbalance in relationships between local communities, project proponents and states. In the SIA literature, however, ethical considerations have received relatively little explicit attention, with greater attention given to outcomes in the form of negotiated agreements and financial and employment results. This paper considers the question of SIA methods from the standpoint of recent Australian national guidelines on ethical engagement with Australian Indigenous people, and argues for much greater attention being given to process and its implications for just and sustainable outcomes in SIA research.

In thinking about the practices of cross-cultural engagement, whether it is in the form of personal encounters with cultural difference, formal processes of inter- cultural consultation in professional fields such as planning and service provision or structured settings such as cross-cultural negotiation and social assessment, we are often confronted with circumstances that are somewhat distant from social theory’s complex abstractions of relationships between abstract selves and abstract others. Concern with difference and alterity has really driven much of Western philosophy for more than 50 years, producing some of the most exciting and frustrating debates in social science. Yet it is the performance rather than theorising of cross-cultural engagements that constitutes and reconstitutes societies and the social and environmental relationships within and between them. It is also the performance of these engagements that challenges societal assumptions of how things are, can be and should be.

The field of social impact assessment (SIA) is one in which cross-cultural relationships, or at least the interface between co-existing cultural groups in the context of a development project, is subject to some degree of critical scrutiny

Correspondence Address: Richard Howitt, Department of Human Geography, Macquarie University,

NSW, 2109, Australia. Email: [email protected]

1366-879X Print/1469-6703 Online/05/020209–13 � 2005 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13668790500237336

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from social researchers. In the case of SIA involving Indigenous Australians, participatory methods have become relatively standard practice, and a negotiations- based approach (for example O’Faircheallaigh, 1999) is widely seen as appropriate.

Much of the SIA research carried out by academics, however—along with a lot of other research involving Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples—is undertaken as ‘consultancies’, outside the normal scrutiny of formal ethical oversight by peers in institutional ethics committees or similar arrangements. A lot of the research is not widely published, being circulated in limited numbers within the ‘grey’ literature of reports that are available for limited time periods and to restricted audiences. Work is often covered by ‘confidentiality’ agreements which restrict wider publication or circulation. From the outside, it might be assumed that such work is already ethically ‘engaged’ if it is commissioned by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander organisations such as land councils or native title representative bodies. In my own experience, however, these bodies are sometimes poorly equipped to deal with questions about research ethics and research methods. They are also themselves subject to significant political, financial and institutional limitations that have implications for SIA and negotiations-related research. Restrictions on publication are difficult to remove, and accountability to the most directly affected people whose concerns are ostensibly at the heart of the SIA or negotiation-oriented research is difficult to scrutinise externally. While, in some cases, robust and effective controls are in place, in others, the procedures seem, at best, to be indirect and far from transparent. In some cases, there is incorporation of some formal peer review prior to acceptance of a report, but this approach is not generally used in studies commissioned by development proponents as part of the environmental impact assessment (EIA) component of their project approval process.

The limited circulation and scrutiny of SIA reports that are not formally published also limit the capacity of local groups not directly involved in a study to learn from the achievements and shortcomings of a particular study. It is in the nature of many of the community-based organisations involved that staff turnover and poor internal communications reduce the awareness of even effective SIA work within the organisations beyond the project team itself. This risks imposing a situation where each new SIA starts again from an earlier level of understanding (or ignorance) rather than building on an accumulation of methodological and conceptual understanding.

Further, it is in the nature of much SIA research that the researchers are in a close relationship with a project proponent, relying on them for funding, informa- tion and implementation. While independence is typically secured through arm’s- length contracts, often involving procedural oversight by a third party—typically an Aboriginal organisation—protection of independence in such research has long plagued impact assessment research. Yet, the proximity to the proponent and to other stakeholders and decision makers also facilitates iterative and contextually sensitive work that can insert crucial information into decision making, approval and evaluative procedures. This paradoxical situation, which juxtaposes dependence and scrutiny in complex ways, is at the heart of the ethical challenge addressed in this paper. In the field of SIA, my concern is with the need for independent evaluation of research in which ethical standards,

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transparency and accountability might better address the needs, concerns and aspirations of marginalised local groups who are so often left to carry the burden of development projects in which the benefits at the local scale are illusory or conditional.

In particular, the lack of transparency in decision making between research findings and recommendations in SIA reports and the implementation phase—the absence of independent evaluation, monitoring and follow-up of SIA research that has been commented on critically over many decades (for example Boothroyd et al., 1995; Gagnon, 2003)—raises the difficult issue of distinguishing the ‘research’ phase, which is really the core concern of ethical oversight in formal ethics committees, and the ‘action’ phase, which may well be of more significance for community-based research participants, but inaccessible to university-based ethical oversight.

The 2003 National Health and Medical Research Council Guidelines:

Values and Ethics

The recent adoption of new formal guidelines regarding ethical conduct in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health research by Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) (2003) offers a benchmark against which such research activities and accountability procedures might be compared. The NHMRC first adopted guidelines in this field in 1991 (NHMRC, 1991) in response to an increasingly articulate Aboriginal critique of research practices, particularly in relation to health research (Humphrey, 2001). Many of the concerns arising in health research, however, were also relevant to wider social science research (for example Howitt et al., 1990). The fact that all grant-funded social research in Australia is legally required to comply with a range of ethical guidelines, including those regarding the interests of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, has not guaranteed compliance from university-sector researchers. Indeed, I was recently interviewed by a Ph.D. student from a major university who was working on an Australian Research Council (ARC)-funded project who clearly neither had specific ethical approval for her work, nor understood the principles of ethical research conduct. In my own institution, where I am a member of the Human Ethics Review Committee, we consistently seek out ways to increase researcher awareness of the ethical issues that arise in applied social research and cross-cultural ‘consultancy’ research activities.

In 2003 an academic anthropologist published a populist piece titled ‘Why I don’t want to be an ‘‘ethical’’ researcher’, which sought to dismiss ethical oversight of research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians as ‘political correctness’, ‘simplistically and crudely bandied about by research police, including those bodies who euphemistically . . . call themselves ethics committees’ (Rolls, 2003, p. 1). Rolls’s controversial paper received prominent attention in the Australian Higher Education Supplement (Lane, 2003). In the context of the NHMRC issuing new guidelines (NHMRC, 2003) which shift the focus of ethical oversight of work involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people away from a ‘protectionist’ framework towards a much more collaborative and creative one, this paper considers just why process matters—ethically, methodologically

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and politically—in SIA and related cross-cultural research, and what implications arise for the practices of SIA, and related researchers. Rolls’s suggestion that public scrutiny of the ethical implications of public research is reducible to a problem of political correctness raises serious issues about the way in which public intellectuals contribute to society. In the case of the shift to a more collaborative approach as advocated by the new guidelines, Rolls’s position reverts to a deeply disempowering

paternalism, in which the researcher is seen as best placed to decide what is appropriate. This is ethically indefensible, but Rolls’s advocacy of this position frames a wider challenge to participatory and action-oriented research, including SIA, outside the domain of publicly funded projects.

At one level the new NHMRC guidelines are quite straightforward. They identify six principles and ‘draw out the implications of each value for research, and how researchers and research proposals might demonstrate engagement and consistency with each value’ (NHMRC, 2003, p. 8). In each case researchers, ethics committees

and ‘participating communities’ are exhorted to consider how proposed research demonstrates consideration of and responsiveness to these values. In each case, researchers and ethics committees are also directed to the relevant sections of the NHMRC Statement on Human Experimentation and Supplementary Notes 1992 (NHMRC, 1992), which is binding on all Australian researchers. The six values

identified are:

. reciprocity—inclusion and mutual recognition lay the foundation for reciprocity in research relationships that ensure that ‘research outcomes include equitable benefits of value to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities or individuals . . . [which should be defined] according to their own values and priorities’ (p. 10);

. respect—research relationships which ‘acknowledge and affirm the right of people to have different values, norms and aspirations’ (p. 11) and in which ‘the trust, openness and engagement of participating communities and individuals is as important as the scientific rigour of the investigation’ (pp. 11–12);

. equality—a commitment to ‘distributive fairness and justice’ and to ‘advance the elimination of inequalities’, because to ‘treat people less favourably is not only unethical, but discriminatory’ (p. 14);

. responsibility—‘researchers carry responsibilities in addition to the science of their inquiry’, including responsibilities ‘for which they or those of the community with whom they work may be held accountable’ (p. 16);

. survival and protection—where researchers or institutions have ignored, denied or undermined Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander values and distinctiveness, it is common for research to be perceived as an ‘exploitative exercise’, and to overcome such legacies, researchers and institutions

‘will need to demonstrate through ethical negotiation, conduct and dissemination of research that they are trustworthy and will not repeat the mistakes of the past’ (p. 18);

. spirit and integrity—a ‘continuity of values and bonds that has sustained and been sustained by the overarching value of spirit and integrity’ which underpins community decision making about research (p. 19).

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Constructing a transparent and accountable demonstration of how research has considered and engaged with these issues is a challenging, but quite reasonable expectation in a cross-cultural setting. Far from constructing ethics committees as the ‘research police’ (Rolls, 2003, p. 1), the NHMRC guidelines exhort researchers, participating communities and institutional ethics committees towards engaged partnerships in which each challenges the others to consider ways in which the challenges of ethical engagement might best be met, without seeking to endorse only those preferred projects of a politically correct view of the world. Indeed, in the case to which Rolls refers to defend his advocacy of a rejection of the demands of ethical oversight—the case of the disputed construction of a bridge and marina at Hindmarsh Island in South Australia—the processes advocated by the NHMRC guidelines could have accommodated rigorous and divergent research collaborations with both sides of the Aboriginal dispute without having to resort to decisive claims about truth. In contrast to Rolls’s individualistic solution, however, there would have been both transparency and accountability constructed into research relationships negotiated consistently with the guidelines—regardless of the political preferences of the various community factions involved.

1

Negotiations-based SIA: Paradoxes and Challenges

This brings me back to SIA research and the grey areas of consultancy research, commercial research for (or about) Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups and research that is embedded in negotiated relationships, such as the research component of negotiations-based SIA research.

In the context of negotiations between development proponents, such as mining companies or infrastructure companies in the resource and tourism sectors, and Aboriginal people with interests in land and waters affected by a project, SIA research can provide an important framework for affected Indigenous peoples to reflect on the issues that have affected, or will affect, their communities, their way of life and their culture, and to develop considered and well-supported negotiation positions. But one of the key principles of negotiation processes involving Indigenous peoples must be the principle of self-determination (Agius et al., 2004), and it is crucial that negotiation positions reflect internal processes and politics rather than developing as an artefact of research or negotiation methodologies. In other words, the development of structures that hold SIA research accountable to affected Aboriginal groups should itself be negotiated in ways that do not insist on a standardised outcome, but in which the groups themselves govern the outcome. Transparency and accountability against appropriate local values and governance structures, and within appropriate geographical and temporal scales, are crucial, but hard to achieve.

In some cases, SIA research is conducted in accordance with published guidelines, using explicit peer review and community-based oversight, and with full publication of final reports. For example, the Resource Assessment Commission’s benchmark study of the Kakadu Conservation Zone and Coronation Hill mining proposal in the early 1990s (Lane et al., 1990) has been discussed in terms of its terms of reference, research methods and conclusions (see for example Howitt, 2001). Similarly, the Kakadu Region Social Impact Study (KRSIS) of the mid-1990s was

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undertaken against excellent terms of reference, under the oversight of a stake- holder committee and an Aboriginal Project Committee, with published reports (Levitus & Aboriginal Project Committee, 1997; Project Advisory Committee, 1997)—yet there has been no explicit discussion of the ethical engagement, oversight and accountability of either of these projects. Indeed, in the KRSIS example, the Project Advisory Committee report ignored or filtered much of what the Aboriginal Project Committee emphasised, and several years after the publication of these reports, and an implementation report (Collins, 2000), there is little evidence to suggest that the SIA facilitated any major change in relationships between the parties on the ground. While there was no specific scrutiny of the process by a formal ethics committee, the work was much more publicly accountable than many of the SIAs undertaken as contract research. And yet the KRSIS demonstrably failed to meet some of the aspirations enshrined in its terms of reference.

The apparent process failures in the KRSIS case raise significant concerns about the efficacy of scrutiny. In much contract research, the drivers for accountability can be, and often are, quite robust, even if there is an absence of external scrutiny in a formal structure. To what extent, then, does this lack of transparency to the ‘external’ world restrict the effectiveness of internal account- ability? In the case of projects which remain within the ‘grey’ literature, with limited publication of terms of reference, final reports and so on, reviewing and assessing the ethical engagement and practical accountability of the work undertaken is even harder than is the case in even flawed public proceedings. Indeed, in many cases, reports are withheld from any public scrutiny, there are no publicly available terms of reference and there are exceptionally restricted grounds for consideration of ethical accountability.

This presents a somewhat paradoxical situation, in which neither approach to SIA research offers an externally transparent means of reviewing the ethical standards of the research against guidelines such as those adopted by the NHMRC. The values specified in the Values and Ethics document certainly establish a framework within which to construct appropriate standards of research practice and mutual accountability between researchers, affected community groups, project proponents, state agencies and other stakeholders. But there are significant challenges.

Let me illustrate with two cases in which I have been directly involved. In the Western Cape York Economic and Social Impact Assessment I was part of a research team led by Ciaran O’Faircheallaigh (Griffith University), along with Annie Holden (ImpaxSIA Consulting). I was recruited into the team because of my previous experience with the Aboriginal community at Napranum, and also because of my previous SIA research experience. When recruited, the terms of funding for the project had largely been finalised between the Cape York Land Council and Comalco Ltd, and I signed a contract, through Macquarie University’s research consultancy arm, to provide my research services for a study which would review the impacts of more than 30 years of bauxite mining on the community most directly affected. That work was carried out under the close supervision of a local Aboriginal steering committee, with oversight from the Cape York Land Council. The time frames, the commercial confidentiality, my role in the research team and the lack of any ethical oversight within Macquarie Research Ltd at that

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time all meant that this work was not submitted to any institutional ethics committee for review nor was it subject to any other formal or independent ethical oversight. It was ethically engaged, and in many ways it actually exemplified many of the values referred to in the NHMRC guidelines. While O’Faircheallaigh (1999) has reflected on the process in a published paper, and the subsequent negotiations built on our SIA work culminated in the finalisation of the Western Cape Communities Coexistence Agreement in March 2001 (Cape York Partnerships, 2003; Comalco Ltd, 2003), the details of the research methods, findings and recommen- dations in the reports remain generally inaccessible. It was only in early 2005 that Comalco staff accepted that it might, in fact, be valuable to have wider public scrutiny of that material as an illustration of good SIA practice (O’Faircheallaigh, pers. comm.). In the absence of any such publication, judging the ‘benefit’ of the research is restricted to consideration of one of its quite direct outcomes—the Western Cape Communities Coexistence Agreement—and the limited discussion in the public domain of a largely confidential process.

In the second case, the SIA research on the Alice Springs to Darwin railway project, I led a small team which investigated the social impacts of the railway on affected Aboriginal people in the Northern and Central Land Council regions. The terms of reference were negotiated between the land councils and the Northern Territory government before there was any practical discussion of the research. The land councils discussed the proposed research and possible terms of reference for a research contract, and were willing to comply with the government’s thinking, which required the scope of the research to be restricted to the ‘tangible physical impacts’ of the new railway—until it became quite clear that to do so would be unethical because it would limit the capacity of the research to consider a range of direct detrimental impacts and potential beneficial opportunities. While my co-researcher Sue Jackson and I have published on our research methodology (Howitt & Jackson, 2000), the two land councils have refused to release the full text of our report for public scrutiny. In late 2004 I approached the project operators to discuss cooperation with a formal post facto review of the project’s impacts and the adequacy and efficacy of the SIA report, but received a brief response indicating that the operator could see ‘no value’ in such a study. In this case, I am less confident that the work undertaken for the SIA exemplifies the values at the heart of the NHMRC guidelines because the scope of the work was so vast, and our capacity to secure meaningful local benefits extraordinarily circumscribed. Nevertheless, I would welcome public scrutiny of the work—if it could be released. Indeed, given that this public infrastructure has proceeded with a range of public costs and benefits, it would be appropriate for such monitoring and scrutiny to be explicitly mandated. If critical documentation such as the SIA report are not publicly accessible, it becomes impossible for the public (either the general public or the affected Aboriginal publics) to audit the project’s performance, or to monitor against predicted consequences. For us as researchers, there is no mechanism to maintain our accountable presence during the construction and operational phases of this project—as these both occurred after the research and reporting phases of the SIA.

The railway project had a number of controversies during construction which revealed divergence from detail of the proposal that was assessed in the EIA

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and SIA processes. One incident, the bulldozing of Gouldian finch habitat, resulted in the appointment of an officer within the Department of Environment and Heritage to monitor construction. Despite an explicit recommendation for a parallel structure to monitor and report publicly on social impacts, there was no capacity in the public arena for anybody to know what the social impacts actually were. One of the problems is that privately contracted studies facilitate governments relinquishing their mandated duty of care to evaluate costs and benefits of development projects in the interests of the entire society—and to minimise harm to any particular groups within society. Such shortcomings inevitably entrench less than satisfactory practices as an effective standard in SIA research—at significant cost to Aboriginal and general public interests in jurisdictions such as the Northern Territory.

Ethical Oversight: Do Researchers Have a ‘Right to Research’?

In my view, it could be said that my colleagues and I failed to construct procedures that were adequately transparent and accountable to external scrutiny, even though a significant public interest might be said to exist in doing so. I should hasten to say that not all my colleagues agree that this is a significant failure, or that we failed to reach an appropriate standard. We occupied different positions in these projects and experienced the local accountability structures differently, and the significance of a lack of external transparency is no simple matter. Indeed, in the context of our shared acceptance that Aboriginal people have a right to self-determination, protecting Aboriginal processes from intrusive external scrutiny is enormously important in empowering people to pursue their own view of their own interests. In these two cases, we operated within constraints that affected funding, timing, terms of reference, methodologies, relationships with research participants, relationships with development proponents, relationships with Aboriginal organisations and local Indigenous governance processes. In both cases we did some of the best research that I have ever been involved in, and in my judgement this was highly ethical research which engaged with and reflected precisely the values identified in the NHMRC guidelines—but to some extent, the public is forced to accept this claim at face value, because the relevant reports cannot be read. The outcomes cannot even be monitored against our recommendations because there is no published version of our recommendations against which either public or Aboriginal authorities might be asked to report. In the case of the Northern Territory study, there have since been other linear projects evaluated, but affected groups have not had easy access to our report, even where they are working for the same organisations that commissioned our work (Sue Jackson, pers. comm.).

Clearly I am uncomfortable with this situation and this paper invites debate on how such work might better proceed. This work has drawn me to a reflection on much of the work that we undertake as applied social researchers, our work as activist researchers, our work in spaces of cross-cultural engagement and the work of my students and graduates in this field, where there is no formal accreditation of SIA professionals and no professional body from which one can be disqualified if one fails to meet appropriate ethical standards. There is no body to which we can appeal when those who contract our services seek to secure inappropriate influence,

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or themselves act in ways that are inconsistent with standards such as those put forward in the Values and Ethics guidelines (NHMRC, 2003).

As a member of an institutional ethics committee, I have observed that many publicly funded researchers operate as if our positions as university employees give us something like a right to research. Ethics oversight for these researchers is dehistoricised and reconfigured as a restraint on or interference with university staff members’ ‘right to research’ on any topic they like. In the context of work in indigenous studies, we neglect the historical context of unethical research at our peril. I accept Rolls’s (2003) important observation that many Aboriginal claims rely on research that was undertaken in ways that would now not be approved by any institutional ethics committee—but that is not the point. One of the lessons of the history of research ethics is that research is always undertaken in a social context, and that research cannot be divorced from its social and cultural settings. None of us has a ‘right’ to research. Our opportunities (and obligations) to undertake research are circumscribed by our circumstances, and privileging the research traditions of, for example, colonial anthropology or geography in the context of Australian research, because it produces some historically significant information, and then setting that as an appropriate standard for contemporary research practice is simply wrong (see Howitt & Jackson (1998) for discussion relevant to geography). Changing social values, legal requirements, technological capacities and theoret- ical frameworks all insist on calibrating contemporary practices to contemporary standards—including ethical standards. It is, perhaps, easier to see the point of ethical oversight in the treatment of animals, of genetic material, of reproductive technologies, and even of psychological research and health research involving risk, than for observational social research, or contracted SIA research.

But just what sort of value might external ethical review add to SIA research undertaken in a negotiations-based approach such as the Western Cape York and Northern Territory railway studies? Clearly, this is not a simple question, but it is relevant to university-based researchers accepting research contracts in a range of cross-cultural settings. In the case of my own university, social science and humanities researchers have worked hard to avoid ethical oversight being reduced to a censorious methodological review. Indeed geographers at Macquarie have been central for nearly a decade to challenging the idea research ethics could, or should, only be applied in a narrowly biomedical mode, contributing significantly to the development of supportive and facilitative ethical oversight of participatory and action-oriented methodologies, qualitative research approaches and cross-cultural research. In particular, the development of iterative approval procedures, which allow researchers to construct increasingly sophisticated collaborative research with indigenous participants without requiring them to pre-empt the outcomes of consultative and negotiation-based exploration of what will be researched and how it will be researched, has encouraged much more open-ended and robust engagements with the NHMRC principles at Macquarie than were previously possible for many researchers. The value of this ethical oversight is that we collectively support the exploration of how the ethical engagement anticipated in the NHMRC guidelines might work in practice.

So, in stark contrast to Rolls’s (2003) assertion that ethical accountability in research institutions is restricted to some sort of enforcement of political correctness,

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we do not assume that either a researcher’s personal ‘good intentions’ or their research rigour will produce adequate research. For my own part, this means that I am always ready to face demanding questioning from my research peers, my students, my research collaborators—both community- and industry-based and professional colleagues—and groups affected by or involved in my research. I recognise that university research resources—however pitiful they may seem to us from time to time, and however much we may decry research funding policies and priorities—are an important part of the structures of power, privilege and disadvantage in contemporary Australia and that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples will continue to see research activities as ambiguous and potentially negative while researchers’ ethical engagement is less than transparent, accountable and open to challenge. Of course, being open to challenge from an institutional ethics committee and being available to challenges from the people who are affected by or interested in our research are quite different matters. I want to assert that the ethical engagement envisaged by the NHMRC guidelines is central to the research enterprise generally, and is absolutely central to any concept of research that involves cross-cultural engagement such as SIA research (see Howitt & Stevens, 2005). Given that ethics committees can be considered a key point at which accountability and ethical engagement of research is overseen and facilitated, the failure to bring social impact research to that arena is significant, yet simply bringing contracted SIA research under the scrutiny of institutional ethics committees will not achieve the sort of outcomes that I am hoping to catalyse here. Again, the paradoxical challenges of improving external scrutiny and responding to indigenous rights to self-determination are more apparent than a solution.

In cases where corporate or government sponsorship of the research is involved, as they were in the case of both the Western Cape York and Northern Territory railway studies, there is a substantial argument to support the need for external ethical review and mandating both publication and formal follow-up, including public participation in monitoring and implementation of recommendations. Yet in relation to practices of self-determination, external scrutiny by yet another non-indigenous authority that claims a right to oversee (and overrule) indigenous decision making and authority is not the answer.

Universities increasingly value externally funded research projects such as contract-funded SIA projects, and the corporatist university will support research dollars coming in from almost any source and rationalise almost any research that can stand some peer review scrutiny. Yet researchers working in indigenous studies must recognise that state and private sector interests are not, and historically have never been, committed to any form of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander self-determination or self-government. Universities do not sponsor research with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as part of a strategy for increased Indigenous participation in university affairs or for recognition of Indigenous rights. As critical social scientists, we really do need to recognise the contexts in which we research; to recognise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations that are authorised by legislation are not always the vehicle for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander self-determination. And we must see that well-intentioned research, well-intentioned negotiations may well contribute to and even initiate

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processes that usurp peoples’ rights to self-determination, self-government and self-representation (see also Agius et al., 2004; Macduff, 2003).

Process Really Does Matter: Questions for Research Practice

The NHMRC guidelines offer a very strong foundation for challenging ourselves about how ethically engaged we are in cross-cultural work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They are not prescriptive, nor are they censorious. They provide a set of reference points and challenges that it is appropriate for us to meet every time we occupy the privileged position of ‘researcher’. External review, for example by an institutional ethics committee, may well be difficult and inconvenient at times. And it may not produce easy responses to difficult questions and challenges—but it is better than no ethical review, and it is a basis for increasingly equitable, awkward and challenging partnerships to develop between researchers, research institutions and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their own institutions and customary procedures that will open new possibilities for challenging the role of research in cross-cultural relations in Australia.

Clearly, process does matter—and ethical engagement is about process. It is a means for focusing researchers on precisely those elements that the input and output obsession of university funding models and career assessment models in the corporatist and managerialist universities we work in so effectively ignore. It focuses precisely on those issues of the social construction of knowledge and its socialised application that critical applied social research should prioritise and acknowledge.

The NHMRC guidelines are a useful opening to a long and complex discussion about appropriate ethical standards and procedures in SIA research, and a reference point in terms of key principles that will need to be considered. The guidelines offer discussion of examples of different models of research, collaboration and management. There is no assertion of a politically correct approach in the guidelines, and there is the prospect for a great diversity of outcomes and approaches to be generated from the guidelines. But there is some common ground in insisting that research is not a detached procedure that can be abstracted from the social, political, historical and geographical context of its participants, subjects and audiences. The models suggested all share:

. . . explicit recognition and commitment to respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural values and principles. The models also promote local relationships to ensure that the nuances of judgement and practice necessary to promote trustworthiness and trust are created and maintained. They also illustrate important aspects of accountability and transparency in standards, and process and structures. (NHMRC, 2003, p. 5)

As a starting point for debating how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights may be best protected and advanced in just, equitable and sustainable ways through contract and applied research such as SIA research, the challenges raised in the NHMRC guidelines are both constructive and challenging. In reflecting on the challenges experienced in work I have been involved in over the past decade,

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I think I have provided a starting point for a fruitful debate about the multiple audiences and axes of accountability that such research constructs. I hope that we might also see some new sorts of procedures emerge which challenge the privileges accorded to ‘research’ in contexts where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their representative bodies may well see things differently from researchers, universities and research funding agencies.

Note

1 It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide an overview of the Hindmarsh Island affair, and

there is a substantial literature available that presents various facets of this complex matter.

See, for example, Brunton (1996), Langton (1996), Fergie (1996), Gelder & Jacobs (1997), Weiner

(1997), Bell (1998) and Simons (2003). Transcripts of the South Australian Royal Commission

are available online at http://www.library.adelaide.edu.au/gen/H_Islnd/ and papers from a

conference on the legal case, which found in favour of the Aboriginal women who refused to

testify to the Royal Commission, can be obtained online at http://www.aas.asn.au/hindmarsh.htm

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