Collaborating for Sustainable Water and Energy Management: Assessment and Categorisation of Indigenous Involvement in Remote Australian Communities

Abstract

Indigenous peoples living in remote areas are often reliant on Governments for essential services and local economic development opportunities. Collaboration and partnership in resource planning and management is espoused as an approach that can provide multiple benefits for all stakeholders including more robust and long-lasting decisions, relationship-building and trust between government and community members as well as capacity building and empowerment of citizens. In Australia however, little evidence from the remote Indigenous community context is available to inform successful collaborations. This paper presents novel research using thematic analysis of practitioner interviews and document review to analyse the current situation of service-provider- remote community engagement and collaboration for sustainable water and energy management. An adapted typology of Indigenous engagement is applied as an analytical framework, categorising water and energy management initiatives according to four key types, each with varying levels of collaboration and implications for sustainable water and energy. Application of the typology shows that technocratic approaches to community engagement continue to dominate this space as collaborative processes are constrained by a range of institutional, governance, technical and cultural factors. The findings have implications for research, policy and practice, and point to a need for a systemic approach to address barriers and facilitate genuine collaboration.

Integration, Application and Importance of Collaboration in Sustainable Project Management

“…Needs for integration of various competences and collaboration of various stakeholders have become increasingly apparent for successful management of the complex and uncertain endeavors involved in inter-organizational infrastructure projects [15]. However, while there is substantial literature on effects of collaborative business arrangements on traditional project performance parameters (time, cost, quality) and innovation [4,16], their benefits for sustainability and sustainable project management have received much less attention. Moreover, previous construction and infrastructure management studies have mostly focused on investment projects [e.g.…”

Participation and Goal Achievement of Multiparty Collaborative Systems Dealing with Complex Problems: A Natural Experiment

“…In such systems, collaboration is emergent and builds on the interactions that unfold within groups (strategy formulation, goal setting, etc.) as well as between groups, in an attempt to develop integrative problem definitions and solutions to address these (solutions in which the interests and perspectives of all stakeholders are represented) [19,21,22]. Multiparty systems are relational spaces [16] where collaborative problem-solving may emerge.…”

Adapting Collaborative Approaches for Service Provision to Low-Income Countries: Expert Panel Results

“…These bodies of literature serve as a firm basis on which this study and future studies of collaborative approaches in low-income country contexts can build. The most applicable and relevant bodies of literature include inter-organizational collaboration [13,15,[40][41][42], collaborative governance [16,18,19,43], institutional collective action [44], collaborative management [45], coalition building [37], community organizing [46][47][48], multi-stakeholder collaboration or partnerships [16,[49][50][51][52], 'samhandling' [53], and collective impact [10,38,[54][55][56][57][58].…”

“…Fortunately, there has been a lot of recent work that has started to identify and disaggregate approaches into different types of collaboration, for example into Informative, Consultative, Collaborative, and Integrative [59]; Networking, Cooperation, Coordination, Coalition, and Collaboration [76]; Consultation, Contracting, Commissioning, Co-production, Co-management, and Certification [12]; Information, Consultation, Involvement, Collaboration, and Empowerment [48]; Collaboration vs Consultation [77], and "Samhandling" which signifies interaction, collaboration, cooperation, and coordination in a single word [53]. While this a good first step, none of these efforts appears to build on one another or attempt to synchronize terms or definitions.…”