Questions to guide non-Indigenous researcher engagement

This post explores what we put forward to be pragmatic ways that help to overcome the unintentional disconnect between non-indigenous researchers and their projects and traditional owners’ interests. We keep this topic specific to our experience in this Pilot Project, but recognise it has been informed by experience and observations over a much broader timescale and geography, and has implications that reach wider than the Reef space…

From our experience speaking and working with non-Indigenous researchers, including those involved in RIMReP projects, there is genuine desire to conduct research that provides benefits for traditional owners, beyond just using rangers as data collection agents. However, understanding how to achieve this, or even where to start going about this very limited and causes frustration and delays for projects with strict time and resource budgets.

While we recognise that the ideal approach is for external researchers to embed traditional owner priorities from the outset, research agendas an institutional barriers mean that this is not always possible. In light of this, and based on our experience often playing an intermediary role between the parties, we offer the following questions for non-Indigenous researchers as a pragmatic jumping off point to begin meaningful engagement and embedding interest benefits into research outcomes:

• Do the Traditional Owners of this land or sea country (or the group that represents their interests) have a local Indigenous-led monitoring program?
• If so, does this local Indigenous-led monitoring program include indicators that are related to our project, or could benefit from the data that our project produces? For instance, does the local monitoring program have indicators related to the type of monitoring that is being done?
• If not, the researchers MUST take the time to understand how the project aligns with the interests of the local groups and recognise that the data produced may be requested in time.
• How could data from this research assist this local programme?
• How could these benefits be generated through the transfer of data or expertise?
• What data is needed to lend this assistance?
• In what format should this data be transferred?
• Does the local group need assistance analysing or making sense of this data?
• Could an assessment they made for this indicator on the group's behalf? That is, could expert knowledge be used to evaluate the local indicator?

All of these questions, although seemingly straightforward, will take good deal of time and consideration to answer properly. In many cases, the local indigenous group will require assistance and prompting to address each of these questions, as their understanding of the technical terms involved and what they mean in a real sense will be limited. This means that time must be taken to understand the local groups monitoring interests, which cannot just be done through an email or individual planning meeting as is so often the case.

Learning note:

Having some structure around terms such as 'engagement' or consultation seem extremely important if they are to achieve any sort of outcomes. This structure can even be provided by a set of questions that guide such engagement.