Thanks for this excellent post Michael,

I agree with your thrust, but I think one can 'leapfrog' the step you're taking. You're wanting to inject more 'athropological' insight into the processes you describe and I smell a bit of a rat. The rat I smell is that the subject is being farmed out to a new (European) specialism.

Anthropology is a powerful discipline for looking at the issues you talk about in a different and in many respects better way - certainly a new lens. But it seems to me too unambitious.

Is it really so hard for a decent generalist public servant not to conduct themselves in harmony with such insights? Perhaps you're thoroughly trained in anthropology. I'm not. But the design of the The Australian Centre for Social Innovation program Family by Family embodies the insights of 'ethnography', but the ethnography was initially done by designers.

And the beauty of the program - which I've discussed a few times - for instance here - http://clubtroppo.com.au/2012/10/02/family-by-family-the-column/ - is that it accesses the insights of clients of the program fairly directly (but at the same time in a structured, professionally considered forward and with coaching - again not via some 'professional' credential but by bespoke training 'on the merits' as I like to say.

While I have little doubt anthropologists can be very useful to us as people who are studying the phenomena with which we seek to interact, I want to insist that what we're after is a kind of applied humility, built into our programs and evidence taking and all the rest of it, not some bolt on specialism.

I hope you get my meaning, and if you do I'd be very interested in your response.

The inaccuracies were part of the point of the song

Thanks for the post Michael.

I don't know if you intend this, but the way you describe evaluation implies that it's an activity that's external to the programs. While I expect it will sometimes make sense to have some external, after the event evaluation, I think this - audit based idea of evaluation us mostly fundamentally mistaken.

The alternative is, monitoring and evaluation of the kind used in sophisticated production in business which is part and parcel of operations with its preeminent purpose being to drive the ongoing optimisation of programs from within. I also propose that such internal means of monitoring and evaluation be done in close collaboration of program delivery, and yet retain ultimate independence from it.

I tried to outline these ideas in some essays last year which I link to below

http://www.themandarin.com.au/64566-nicholas-gruen-evaluator-general-part-two/

http://clubtroppo.com.au/2016/08/19/markets-supply-chains-brains-and-human-services/

I'd be very interested in your reaction to the ideas.

Hi Michael,

I've posted a reply on Troppo. It might be more likely to engender further discussion on Troppo than here, but have also posted it here for your reference and the reference to anyone else who reads this and not Troppo.

Hi Michael,

I was drafting my response to your post in your comments section but then thought that there was more chance of getting discussion going here so have posted it here. We also have at least one person in the Troppo community with deep knowledge and goodwill in the area - indeed he is the only Grand Dragon of the Knights of Troppo - Ken Parish.

Thanks for your kind words of introduction and for taking my post in the spirit it was intended. I wade into the area with some trepidation for reasons that I expect you find obvious. It would be easy to pick pretty much any paragraph of my post and argue that it was typical white buck-passing, failure to understand, etc.

I'll reproduce, in summarised form, your suggestions and offer some commentary on them.
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>First</strong>, mainstream Australia is too quick to dismiss symbolism; it is not sufficient to resolve deep-seated disadvantage, but as a nation we have comprehensively underestimated the deep, ongoing and inter-generational psychological impact of cultural dispossession. The statistics on Indigenous mental health are testament to this. Symbolic actions by governments, corporations and individuals all have an important role to play in healing this insidious damage. Paradoxically, for many if not most Indigenous citizens, many ‘symbolic’ actions by mainstream Australia are actually demonstrations of good faith with tangible consequences for the way they feel about their status as citizens and the ways they see themselves within the Australian society and polity.</p>
I think this is a fair point. On the other hand it's important to be aware of its downsides which are largely in the <em>substitution</em> of substantive engagement with symbolic engagement. About ten years ago my daughter's up market girls private school in Melbourne took upon itself an aboriginal reconciliation program with the arrival of a new headmistress full of the latest corporate speak. There were KPIs for the teachers, any number of strategies announced, and the highest profile initiative of the reconciliation program was having two aboriginal girls flown in from (I think it was Katherine). Everyone tried to be nice, but the two girls were, as you'd expect, completely freaked out. They didn't have to go to classes if they didn't want to - after all we all know that aborigines go on 'Walkabout' don't we? Anyway, one ended up self-harming and returned after a few months. The other lasted a year or so.

In some ways because symbolic initiatives are aimed very broadly, they disguise continuing lack of engagement as engagement. Everyone acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, their elders past and present, and the presence of real aboriginal people and aboriginal experience doesn't get beyond noble savagedom. I see the confrontation and engagement with the <em>strangeness</em> of aboriginal and European culture to each other as the central issue and central opportunity of our cohabitation together and within it the radical assertion of each others' humanity and the potential for us both to grow through that process of encountering each other. If that strikes you as high blown and kind of absurdly utopian or 'literary' rather than practical, I think it's at the heart of successful policy making - something which I commented on at the end of my post - the potential for human centred design to actually spearhead the process of engagement and so lead joint projects between aboriginal communities and the dominant European system that have some chance of growing roots and working.
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Second</strong>, as a nation, and in our public policies, we display remarkably little commitment to enabling and encouraging informed Indigenous choice in all sorts of contexts. … An example is the limited support the nation provides for the maintenance of Indigenous languages, and our extraordinary incapacity to recognise the potential value for all Australians that might derive or be sourced from the extraordinary cosmologies, natural history and environmental insights and knowledge which go hand in glove with language.</p>
Hear hear! I would say that aboriginal language is a perfect example of policy that hits all bases magnificently. It's symbolic. It's about <em>their</em> languages and because of that, though it's an invitation to white engagement for any who, like William Dawes, wishes to engage it is almost immune from transformation by white dominance. It's also practical as it helps the articulation of aboriginal perspectives and it's hard to believe it doesn't foster aboriginal agency in myriad ways large and small. (I suspect it's also important to resource bilingualism to avoid ghettoisation).
<p style="padding-left: 30px;"><strong>Third</strong>, I propose that perhaps the single most transformative change we could adopt as a nation in relation to Indigenous citizens would be to adopt a constitutional prohibition against racial discrimination directed against all races. The nation was established and founded upon notions of racial superiority, and while we have made great strides as a nation in overcoming racial discrimination, we have a long way to go. The Racial Discrimination Act (section 18C aside) attracts broad support, yet it is vulnerable to the whim of the Executive and a potentially populist Senate, not just now, but into the indefinite future.</p>
I am not playing dumb here. I am simply at a complete loss to understand any of this. Could you outline in a much more concrete way - and with examples
<ul>
<li>what such provisions would look like (ie an example of the kinds of words that might be used)</li>
<li>in what circumstances they would have some impact on the way things unfold in the way our lives are played out and</li>
<li>why this is "the single most transformative change we could adopt as a nation".</li>
</ul>
Finally a further thought occurred to me when I was reading through some other posts on your excellent blog site where I hope to read some more. Here's a passage of yours responding to the question of income management which, as I've recently come to understand, is an example of meme driven policy as groundhog day if ever there was one:
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">I don’t deny that there is a government and policymaker mindset about Indigenous people and communities, and it is not necessarily accurate or well informed. It tends to seek simplistic solutions to what are complex problems, and in this sense I agree with Klein’s conclusion that policy should accept and address social and political complexity much more than it does.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">The critics of income management however have allocated extraordinary efforts to parsing and dissecting the policy of income management from every conceivable angle (I am not referring just to the contributors to this volume when I say this). They allocate very little attention to discussing the existence of community violence and dysfunction, indeed, it is as if it doesn’t exist.</p>
I'd propose a serious attack on this problem - which is about as bad as things can get short of (and arguably including) civil war. It would embody some of the principles that I think are generally accepted within the field (while throwing in a few refinements of my own) including being:
<ul>
<li>community based and embracing principles of human centred design with</li>
<li>evidence based (and in a thoughtful not tokenistic or sloganistic way - I've suggested what I have in mind <a href="http://www.themandarin.com.au/64566-nicholas-gruen-evaluator-general-part-two/">here</a>. That evidence needs to
<ul>
<li>serve the needs of those delivering the program on the ground to optimise their effectiveness</li>
<li>be publicly accessible (subject to appropriate privacy protections) to generate both a knowledge commons and public accountability and support for those elements of initiatives that clearly succeed</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>focused on individual communities but with some executive authority and resources to integrate the array of government services into the wider unitary endeavour to reduce violence. There are some <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit">very promising models</a> of this kind of action being taken in urban contexts.</li>
<li>networked from the start as some kind of learning endeavour with the program being grown from one or a handful of communities, which progressively learn from experience.</li>
</ul>
From there the program could be grown to go wherever it could be of benefit but I'd also want to build <em>from the program</em> rather than from existing government programs.

&nbsp;

Some interesting designs - some are nice too!