Indigenous communities now own and/or manage 66 million hectares of protected places across Australia, and have obligations and interests across 90% of northern Australia. Whilst good progress has been made supporting Indigenous communities to manage this vast estate, ‐ training Indigenous rangers, IPAs and marine and coastal management plans ‐ western orthodoxy has tended to break these complex systems into silos and treat them as separate entities.
Indigenous people continue to articulate their wholeness and the special relationship between people, country and culture. A new Indigenous‐led approach or governance platform was first considered by Traditional Owners and proposed to NESP 1 Hubs as a means to strategically engage with the national research agenda whilst empowering Traditional Owners, in research participation and leadership. The concept has expanded to encompass a national agenda in response to the overwhelming interest from southern Indigenous groups, giving rise to a proposed National Indigenous Environmental Research Network (NIERN) supported by over 40 Indigenous groups from northern and southern Australia.
This presentation will review; the current approach to the research agenda, the problem and the way forward for a more efficient and effective pathway. This network would strive to: drive adoption of best practice (UNDRIP/FPIC) ; ensure that research is compatible with culturally based decision making, and is ethical; create efficient governance reflecting local and regional input into program co‐design, co‐implementation and knowledge repatriation; amplify the recognition, use and value of Traditional knowledge, customs and practice while increasing the opportunity for intergenerational knowledge transfer in the Indigenous community; create succession and leadership pathways for the Indigenous research sector, including training early career researchers.