ID: 1975
Presenting Author: Emma Woodward
Session: 540 - Transformative IA - System Changing Leadership and Communication
Status: pending
Australian and Canadian examples of Indigenous-led IA frameworks go beyond consent to offer relational transformation for proponents, practitioners, and communities.
The authors co-present their shared experiences of Indigenous-led impact assessment and ethical research practices in Australia and Canada that integrate multiple progressive approaches. Partnerships founded on respect for Indigenous rights, knowledges, and values; engagements delivering mutual benefits; decision processes that are context-specific and attend to local governance protocols; strengths-based and appreciative inquiry; systems thinking; trauma-informed approaches; and culturally relevant gender-based analyses, are described together, with concrete examples, to suggest a transformative approach to impact assessment. Using these approaches in concert honours assets (appreciative inquiry), pays to attention to power (Indigenous-led), maps dynamic systems (systems thinking), responds to trauma legacies (trauma-informed), and attends to gender, culture and power (CRGBA). We argue that such integrative frameworks, combined with tailored digital tools (e.g., documentary film, digital stories, podcasts, and interactive websites) hold promise for more inclusive, effective and transformative impact assessments in Indigenous and settler-contexts alike. Relational transformation for the proponent, IA practitioner, and community is possible when the aim is to go beyond consent.
Emma is a Snr Research Scientist (community-engaged geographer) with CSIRO, Australia. Heather holds the President’s Impact Chair in Transforming Governance for Planetary Health at UVic, Canada
Coauthor 1: Heather Castleden