Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020. xi, 207 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 9780231198172.
In Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention, Tess Lea traces successive failures of Australian government efforts to improve housing and address socio-economic disparities among Northern Territory Indigenous communities. Her study is motivated by a question: “Can there be good Indigenous social policy under late liberal settler occupation?” Through descriptions of bureaucratic entanglements at a rural health clinic on Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands over a social housing program, and disputes over-extending a manganese mine in Groote Eylandt, Lea develops a meso-scale approach to evaluating instances of “policy translation and re-presentation” (17). She argues that interventions such as the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program (SIHIP), launched in the city of Darwin in 2008 to address reports of child and alcohol abuse through improved housing and education, became undermined by increasing bureaucracy, misunderstandings, and the desire to demonstrate results (41). Lea shows how policy emerges within embodied relationships between managers and employees, supervisors and consultants by attempting to smooth out rough edges of inequalities, while reinforcing the logic of an extractive economy.
Wild Policy attempts to resist closure or boundaries: instead of a village ethnographic case study where meanings and practices can be elicited and explained in terms of a whole or give particular policy interventions “a biography” (24), Lea introduces “policy ecology” in chapter 1 as a frame for understanding how people and places “intra-act.” In chapter 2 she evaluates how the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (the “Intervention”) failed to deliver adequate housing to affected communities. Reports of widescale social and health issues led the government to fund housing projects in 18 growth towns—as matter of public health, but also to improve “life expectancy, school attendance, training, employment, and health, while transforming sexual moralities, self-discipline, money hoarding, and family conduct” (41).
In exchange for social development, traditional owners were asked to give their community leasehold title to the government, overseen by a thicket of technical committees, a contractual kinship system of subcontractors, and firms (45), including a Joint Steering Committee (JSC), Regional Partnership Agreements (RPAs), and Strategic Alliance Leadership Team (SALT). As the project began to sink under the weight of organizational mishaps, cost overruns, and paperwork, managers sought to project order over the messiness of budget increases and project delays. Amidst failure, Lea highlights the sometimes-heroic roles of “street-level bureaucrats” who attempt to tame “wild bureaucratic ganglia” through reports that attempt to produce “good” outcomes.
In chapter 3, Lea turns to Groote Eylandt, site of an enormous open pit manganese mine run by Groote Eylandt Mining Company (GEMCO), and conflicts over mining and development. She describes how resident Mamarika and Amagula clans fought over plans to extend mining leases. Some argue that revenue would bring much-needed resources to an impoverished community suffering from unemployment and high incidents of neurologic diseases; others fight to protect seascapes and culturally-vital songlines from destruction. In describing difficult tradeoffs facing the Anindilyakwa Land Council, Lea shows how Indigenous social policy in Australia has a “hologramic quality” that simultaneously affords opportunity for gain and loss (82).
She extends this analytic focus across subsequent chapters to argue that policy ecology emerges in the middle—that people everywhere are stuck in “situationally specific socio-material contexts” (or milieus) (115). This situational embeddedness constrains action of Indigenous Australians or impoverished people when dealing with police or attempting to fill out paperwork. But Lea argues that stickiness within a particular milieu also affords an opportunity for creativity and movement towards better outcomes. Chapter 4 presents efforts of an Indigenous Karrabing Film Collective to argue for increased attention to the processes by which policy emerges and is negotiated. Chapter 5 examines interconnections between militarism, natural resource extraction, and social policy. She describes how the health clinic, a housing project, and her own access as an anthropologist are rooted to a geostrategic context, where the Anglican Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the Northern Territory administration welfare branch created colonial dependencies that facilitated subsequent negotiations with BHP mining company for extracting manganese to be used in global steelworks, rifle barrels, prison bars, and dry-cell batteries (136).
Reading Wild Policy is a bit like bushwhacking: the reader should not expect a clearly marked path through woody prose and occasional thickets of social theory. Yet its contribution to the anthropology of policy rests on careful attention to the micro-policy affects of individual actors and coalitions we encounter across each chapter. Some of the book’s richest ethnographic descriptions can be read in several “interludes” between chapters, where Lea recounts conversations with John Singer, former head of the Nganampa Health Council. In one such encounter, Singer argued against the installation of a renal dialysis machine due to concerns about whether his small rural clinic could sustain the equipment’s costs and logistics. In another example he bemoans a 2017 visit of South Australia’s Health Minister to APY Lands, who ignored local experts and spent time visiting art galleries (63–65). Singer’s reflections embody the work of street-level bureaucrats to speak about, debate, and attempt to salvage messy policy. Lea shows how it is often the beneficiaries who are the real experts all along.
In answering the book’s central question, Lea argues that “good” Indigenous social policy is “the best that be expected” since “the full interests of extractive capitalism will always precede, and exceed, the interests of Indigenous people under continuing settler occupation” (157). Rather than hope for better alternatives, she calls for honest partnerships with community coalitions, listening, and ethical project management as a route to better project outcomes. Her final chapter recommends attending to relations between people and contexts. She calls for attention to details by people and networks who can make a positive difference, acting as brokers and translators to bend a rule or assist with overwhelming paperwork despite physical and emotional damage. Her call to act is an acknowledgement that critique alone is insufficient—that microlevel attention and care matter, and that despite the messiness of policy and the worlds we inhabit, people can still make a difference in the end.
Ian Parker
University of California San Diego, San Diego