Our Knowledge Our Way in caring for Country: Indigenous-led approaches to strengthening and sharing our knowledge for land and sea management. Best Practice Guidelines from Australian Experiences.

Abstract

These Guidelines are a key output from a project of the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program (NESP), Northern Australia Environmental Resources (NAER) Hub, titled Knowledge Brokering for Indigenous Land Management. Building institutional and individual capacity through distilling and sharing best practice is a key goal of the project funders and partners. The project co-leaders – the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance and CSIRO – established an Indigenous-majority Project Steering Group to ensure Indigenous leadership of the project (Table i). The Project Steering Group asked “who decides what is best practice and how?” and provided the critical direction that: Indigenous people must decide what is best practice in working with our knowledge. The Guidelines are therefore Indigenous-led and based on an open, transparent process established by the Project Steering Group of calling for Indigenous people to submit case studies where: - Indigenous people are using their Indigenous and traditional knowledge to care for their Country, including in the development of business opportunities and enterprises - Indigenous people have experienced positive engagement and good outcomes when their Indigenous knowledge has been brought into comanagement or research projects - Indigenous people and their knowledge have been treated the right way when engaging with others (government, non-government organisations, researchers, industry, etc.) - Indigenous land managersshare lessons learned about knowledge sharing- Indigenous land managers identify the conditions under which good knowledge sharing can occur(Appendix 1).