Bureaucratised Relationships: Contracting for Change

This chapter explores how a First Nations organisation, which started as a self-determination initiative and still sees itself through that lens, negotiates its approach to programming in an entirely different environment. In this environment the bureaucratic mode of programming has deeply affected the organisation’s relationships internally and with its constituency and continues to tighten its grip on both. The chapter theorises that governments’ approach to Indigenous programming (at Federal and State levels) is an attempt by the state to engineer social change and reflects in many ways what Scott (Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, The Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Yale University Press, 2005) calls ‘high modernism’—that is, it encompasses the administrative ordering of society; the use of the power of the state to achieve its designs; and a civil society unable to resist. The policy approach requires simplifications so that the state can ‘read’ the society and impose its will on it. It fails to grasp the complexity of the society and the continuing strength of Aboriginal cultures, and the value of the ‘metis’ or practical knowledge, which the Aboriginal organisation possesses through its deep and longstanding relationship with its communities and embeddedness in them. The chapter focuses on a case study of the First Nations organisation Marra Worra Worra and its management of contracted housing and employment programs.