Positioning paper

• Paul Memmott, Carroll Go-Sam, James Davidson
• Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute

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31 May 2010Building procurement is defined as ‘the act or process of bringing into being a building that was not there before and embraces all the activities that might be necessary to that objective’. Aboriginal housing procurement practice occurs in a complex context of political, market, and industry dynamics. Housing procurement is delivered using the practical and legal mechanism of a building contract into which drawings and specifications are incorporated in order to bring into being a physically defined outcome that was not there before. But there is a relative absence within current Indigenous housing literature that directly addresses the relation between the procurement method, and the social, human and economic outcomes of the supply of housing, or the ‘social, cultural, human and economic capitals’ as they are termed herein.

Achieving high-level outcomes beyond the physical units of houses is fraught with difficulty in remote Indigenous housing. Despite this, there are some procurement success stories; with this in mind, this project aims to assess what has been achieved during the last decade of procurement of Aboriginal housing, as grounded in actual practice. Aboriginal housing procurement, if done well, would not only diminish livelihood vulnerabilities, but would also strengthen self-governance and generate services responsive to community demand. As will be discussed in this Positioning Paper and further explored in the subsequent research Final Report, the significance of a better understanding of housing procurement systems within the context of remote Indigenous communities has potential benefit for all peoples engaged in the built environment sector.

Specifically, this study explores the relationships between remote Indigenous housing procurement and the broader objectives of Indigenous communities. It contributes to an understanding of the potential longer-term economic, social, health and cultural outcomes of current and future housing policies and housing delivery programs. It also aims to address the lack of published comparative analyses of case studies on what the authors gloss as the ‘socio-economic capitals’ of housing procurement methods. This Positioning Paper reviews the available literature on the socio- economic capitals of housing outcomes, describing them systematically and documenting any established techniques of measuring such outcomes. In the next stage of the project (post=literature analysis), we shall sample a selected number of best practice case studies, to examine in more depth, a range of the types of benefits outlined above. The project aims to generate and discuss strategies, guidelines, principles and measures for good Aboriginal housing procurement practices in remote Australia.

Housing procurement in remote Aboriginal communities has at times been sporadically linked to other forms of government service delivery outcomes and objectives such as construction, maintenance, training, employment, education, governance, management, health, sustainability; yet still further program values have emerged in recent years that can best be described as ‘symbolic capitals’ inclusive of leadership, mutual respect, positive cultural identity and other life skills outcomes.

Close examination of all the capitals (social, human, natural, economic and physical) upon which housing procurement impinges reveals a stark gap in the inclusiveness of social capital theory to respond to the unique circumstances of human settlement in remote Indigenous contexts. This gap has been addressed by introducing the theory of ‘sustainable livelihoods framework’, which attempts to emphasise improved life outcomes in alignment with remote Indigenous settlement expectations and has the potential to link a range of capitals to housing procurement and to the distinctive markets of hybrid economies evident in the majority of remote settlements.