Indigenous Peoples, Poverty, and Self-Determination in Australia ...

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Indigenous Peoples, Poverty and Self-Determination• Capable governing institutions. Indigenous peoples have to beable to exercise decision-making power effectively. Doing sorequires institutional stability, depoliticized dispute resolutionmechanisms such as tribal courts, depoliticized managementof resources and enterprises, skilled administration, and otherprovisions. These create an environment of governmentalaction that is stable, fair, competent and reliable, shifting thefocus of government towards nation-building and away fromfactional battles over resources. 13• A congruence between formal governing institutions andIndigenous political culture. There has to be a match betweenthe formal institutions of governance and prevailing ideaswithin the community or nation about how authority shouldbe organized and exercised. This cultural match is the sourceof government’s legitimacy with those being governed, andtherefore a source of its effectiveness (see Lipset 1963). Oneof the handicaps facing American Indian nations has beenthe stark mismatch between Indigenous social and politicalorganization on the one hand and, on the other, an imposedoverlay of governing institutions designed largely by the U.S.government in the 1930s. This has tended to produce tribalgovernments that lack support with their own citizens, havedifficulty getting things done, and easily become objects ofpolitical opportunism and factional conflict.Where these three factors are in place, community assets—fromnatural resources to location to human capital—begin to pay off.Where they are missing, such assets are typically squanderedor fail to yield their potential. In short, it is the political factorswhich either limit or release the potential of economic and otherassets. 1413. The idea that governing institutions matter to economic performance andsocietal well-being is well-established. See, for example, North (1990),;Oberschall(1990); Barro (1991); Ostrom (1992); Knack and Keefer (1995); Egnal(1996); and La Porta et al. (1997, 1998, 1999).14. For these results, see in particular Cornell and Kalt (1992, 1995, 1997a,14
CornellThe meaning and role of self-ruleThe first of these factors—sovereignty or self-rule—is of criticalinterest to this discussion. Sovereignty or self-rule appears to be anecessary, but not sufficient, condition for sustainable developmenton Indigenous lands.I say “sovereignty or self-rule” because of the ideas of exclusivityand indivisibility often attached to the term “sovereignty.” Theprotection and expansion of “tribal sovereignty” have long beencentral political objectives of American Indian nations, but theterm has not necessarily implied separate statehood or absoluteauthority vested in Indian hands. On the contrary, its commonusage in Indian politics has tended to accommodate the possibilityof a shared or limited sovereignty, a usage that has roots in, amongother places, the Marshall trilogy of U.S. Supreme Court decisionsin the 1820s and early 1830s that described Indian societies asdomestic dependent nations that, nonetheless, remained distinctpolitical communities and retained exclusive authority within theirterritories. 15 Within this usage, one can imagine a sovereignty thatis flexible both in the degree and the scope of authority acrossinstitutional or policy domains and that is tailored to supporta particular relationship between peoples or nations. In somedomains it may be an exclusive sovereignty; in some, it may beshared. Sovereignty thus becomes a continuous as opposed to adichotomous variable. 161997b, 2000, 2003); also Krepps and Caves (1994); Jorgensen (2000a); Jorgensenand Taylor (2000); Jorgensen et al. (forthcoming); and Harvard Projecton American Indian Economic Development (1999, 2000, 2003).15. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (5 Pet.) 1 (1831); Worcester v.Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832). See the discussion of these decisions inDeloria and Lytle (1983).16. See the discussion of sovereignty in Maaka and Fleras (2000: 92-4) and ofdevolution in Smith (2002: 3-5).15
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