Action Research Report - Good Governance Practice Leads to Good Relationships
Deadly Gathering coordinated by Mad Mob to meet the Hon Linda Burney MP, Federal Member for Barton, and Susan Templeman MP, Federal Member for Macquarie.
Littlewell Working Group members.
In 2018, Community First Development launched its first action research project that aims to evaluate the effectiveness of its community development approach, and explore why self-determination, leadership and governance are important to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) has provided research ethics approval and 12 communities across urban, regional and remote locations have agreed to participate.
Community First Development designed the two-year action research project to create a structured process to continue its evaluation capacity building in a culturally inclusive and safe way. The research project is embedded into the work we do, enabling us to collect, analyse and immediately apply the research findings to strengthen our community development practice.
In April 2020, we released the project’s First Report. The First Report marks Community First Development’s continuing commitment to share our learnings, data and evidence of good governance practices in First Nations settings.
This First Report focuses on the design and initial work that we have done, which includes some new insights around research methodology and our initial understandings about creating Bridges in Governance.
We have now completed the first two phases of our research plan, working together with the 12 communities. This includes the completion of four co-authored case studies, the first round of semistructured interviews, and governance matrices. Our Community Development Team and Research Steering Committee have also met every six weeks to two months to share stories from participating communities and reflect on our learnings and the emerging themes.
The key themes we think are emerging from the data can be grouped into the following areas:
Governance, particularly the concept of ‘bridges’ (tools, strategies and pathways) to navigate into the intersecting space where First Nations Governance and Western Governance meet; and
Community First Development ways of working, particularly the importance of trust and how communities see us as an ‘instrument’ that can support them to achieve their goals.
Through this project, we have also been strengthening our research practices. We have created, piloted and adapted a Seed to Tree monitoring and evaluation tool and experimented with a new approach to program theory and logic. We have also learnt that yarning is the most effective tool to use to talk deeply with people about governance practices.
We have now commenced the final phase of our research plan. As a first step, our Community Development team will check the emerging themes with participating communities to see if we are on the right track. They will do this through yarning interviews. Given Community First Development’s current hold on all face-to-face activities due to COVID-19, these will occur via video-conferencing where this is possible. We will also work with the remaining participating communities to draft case studies, ensuring that community voice is privileged.