Evaluating the impacts of land use agreement-making on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: Developing methodologies and identifying strategies

© 2016 Dr. Kieran Morgan KnightOver the past 25 years agreement-making between Australian Indigenous traditional land owners and mining companies has come to prominence as the preferred method for resolving issues of native title, reducing inequalities, and improving the wellbeing of Indigenous communities in mining regions. Agreements have intrinsic value from an ethical and equity perspective, but despite their growing importance and the vast sums of money involved, to date there has been little formal evaluation of their ultimate impact in terms of health and social outcomes. The lack of research in this important area is due to substantial existing barriers, most notably a lack of quality data, and a lack of appropriate methodological approaches. This thesis argues that despite these barriers it is imperative to investigate this issue which is of substantial importance for policy makers, mining companies, and most importantly Australian Indigenous communities. The broad aim of this thesis was to develop and test qualitative and quantitative methodological approaches for evaluating the impacts of mining and agreement-making in terms of Indigenous health and social outcomes. Part 1 of this thesis provides background and context to this complex issue as well as explicating key definitions and reviewing existing research in this area. Part 2 develops and employs data regarding mortality rates and child development for use in a macro-level analysis of the impacts of both mining and agreement-making on these outcomes. Part 3 develops and tests a novel case-control methodology for comparing outcomes in seven selected areas with a high number of agreements, to a group of matched controls without agreements. Part 4 is a qualitative investigation into the workings of one specific agreement, the Yandicoogina Land Use Agreement, and specifically examines factors contributing to the flow of benefits to the community. Part 5 draws together and discusses the results from the various analyses and discusses future prospects for the methodologies and data that were developed and tested. The preliminary findings from the analyses indicate that there is little evidence to suggest that agreements are having a substantial positive impact on the outcomes measured, and that many practical challenges remain for organisations administering these agreements. The challenges and limitations of conducting this type of analysis remain substantial. Therefore arguably the main contribution that this thesis makes is not in the preliminary findings, but in demonstrating plausible and useful methods for investigating these important questions. As data quality and availability inevitably improves over time, the methodologies and datasets developed in this thesis can be used as a guide for future research into this important topic