This volume explores Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' interactions with public sector bureaucracies. The authors featured here consider how bureaucracy relates to colonialism, race, and sovereignty in a post-neoliberal world. They also consider the diverse ways in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people working within and across these sectors negotiate and engage with bureaucratic structures. Some contributors offer critiques of bureaucratic hierarchies, and others provide insights into the complexity of bureaucratic culture, drawing attention to the complex strategies of Indigenous people who aim to make bureaucracy 'work' for themselves and their communities. The volume overall provides a nuanced and substantive analysis of the relation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples' to the contemporary administrative state, and an innovative perspective from which to examine Indigenous-settler relations. For those concerned with Indigenous policymaking, this volume puts forward a new approach that focuses on policy relationships, rather than processes or outcomes.

Autorentext

Julie Lahn is an anthropologist and Fellow in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Her research engages First Nations civil/public servant insights into government bureaucracies including (with Samantha Faulkner) 'Navigating to Senior Leadership in the Australian Public Service: Identifying barriers and enablers for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in APS employment' (CAEPR, 2018). She was a researcher and educator in ANU's Centre for Aboriginal and Economic Policy Research from 2006 to 2023.

Elizabeth Strakosch is a lecturer in public policy and politics at the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and co-director of the Institute for Collaborative Race Research. She is the author of Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the 'Post-Welfare' State (Palgrave, 2015). She is currently an Australian Research Council Early Career Research Fellow. From 2013 to 2022 she worked as a senior lecturer in policy at the University of Queensland.

Patrick Sullivan is Professor at Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia, Broome, and Honorary Professor at Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Canberra. A political anthropologist, Professor Sullivan is the author of All Free Man Now: Culture, Community and Politics in the Kimberley Region North Western Australia (Aboriginal Studies Press, 1996) and Belonging Together: Dealing with the Politics of Disenchantment in Australian Indigenous Policy (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2011). He was Project Leader of the ARC Discovery Project: Reciprocal Accountability and Public Value in Aboriginal Organisations (DP160102250).