Abstracts and Biographies:
Indigenous
Mending Fences –The mediation of
native title agreements between Pastoralists and Aboriginal Peoples
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Craig Jones
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| Aboriginal peoples have consistently sort to protect the
ownership of their traditional lands. This has been approached in a number of ways: direct
action including armed resistance and strikes, seeking to influence the legislature, going
to court and finally seeking to make agreements. This paper focuses on the later and
addresses the issue of cross-cultural mediation in the native title context with a
particular focus on Aboriginal peoples and pastoralists. The paper proposes that interest
based mediation techniques are the best way to approach cross-cultural disputes. These
techniques allow parties to address power imbalances on their way to durable outcomes. In
this sense successful mediation across cultural boundaries is supported by pre-mediation
work to ensure that parties are able to make effective decisions. The mediation is then
conducted in a bi-cultural space at the intersection of pastoral and aboriginal domains.
The construction of a conflict resolution domain allows the parties to manage cultural
issues and power differences effectively. The interaction of local peoples in making
effective land management decisions will lead to practical reconciliation.
[Read the full paper]
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Craig Jones
I am currently a full time PhD student at Queensland
University in the Aboriginal Environments Research Centre. My thesis topic seeks to
investigate cross-cultural mediation technique and theory as it is applied in Australian
rangelands. For around the last tens years I have been working with Aboriginal peoples and
other rural Australians in achieving cooperative land management outcomes. Most recently I
have been working in the native title arena with the National Native Title Tribunal (5
years) in Queensland. I hope to bring some of the insights from my practical
mediation/negotiation work into the theory work behind my PhD thesis. Much of my work has
been about the empowerment of local peoples, indigenous and non-indigenous, in effective
decision making. It is the ability of local peoples to make effective decisions about
issues that effect their lives that will bring about practical reconciliation. |
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Updated 21 February 2003 |
