The Cultural Science Team is part of the Science Division in the Department of Climate Change, Environment, Energy, and Water. We coordinate and support cultural science research projects with other department sections and external stakeholders.
What is cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting?
Cultural monitoring, evaluating and reporting is a method used to measure cultural outcomes in realising healthy Country through cultural practices. Cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting is a framework that supports healthy Country, healthy culture and healthy people.
Cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting differs from other frameworks and has a unique set of principles. These principles are:
- facilitating Aboriginal-led, relationships-based, collaborative research processes
- fostering co-learning and intergenerational transmission of knowledge
- recognising Aboriginal health as holistic, including the mental, physical, cultural and spiritual health of both people and Country
- building community capacity to undertake their monitoring, evaluation and reporting in a self-reporting framework
- supporting communities to practice and exercise their cultural obligations to Country
- supporting the application of cultural knowledge without trying to validate or evaluate that knowledge
- utilising all our senses (smell, feel, sound and visual cues)
- ensuring cultural safety best practices are used through Indigenous cultural intellectual property rights and free, informed and prior consent.
The need for cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting
Aboriginal communities, as a voice for the Ancestors and Country, are increasingly being involved in landscape management and planning. This involvement is unique because it is driven by the understanding and application of Aboriginal knowledge and culture.
Aboriginal people have been caring for Country under the guidance of our Ancestors and through actively applying Lore/Law, Kinship and Dreaming for thousands of generations. Aboriginal people are always observing, monitoring, adapting and being sustainable through cultural practice and knowledge sharing on Country.
How we are working with cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting
We support Aboriginal communities in developing and implementing their own cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting frameworks.
This approach means that outcomes are diverse and responsive to different peoples, places and priorities. We do this through:
- reviving and revitalising cultural practice – supporting Aboriginal communities to demonstrate the benefits of cultural practice to outcomes for Country
- being on Country, working with Country and Ancestors – supporting Aboriginal communities to demonstrate their holistic approach to cultural land management
- understanding place from a cultural perspective – breaking down the artificial culture-nature divide so that Aboriginal communities can explain cultural outcomes holistically
- embracing and collaborating with technical and scientific partnerships – to mediate and improve the exchange of knowledge between different knowledge systems
- supporting improved economic models of Aboriginal communities' contribution to environmental outcomes – to enable equitable understanding of the impacts of environmental policy on Aboriginal communities and Country
- transferring knowledge on Country – to recognise that cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting is intergenerational and part of ongoing living culture.
What we are learning
We have been very privileged to learn from Ancestors, Country, many Elders, knowledge holders and communities as we define what cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting is. We are learning that cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting is:
- about culture-and more specifically, the doing of culture. While cultural monitoring, evaluation and reporting may include technical methods of measurement, it's the cultural principles and practices that matter
- not new – Aboriginal people have always applied it as part of living in partnership with Country. What is new is sharing it with an audience who are coming to realise the impact cultural approaches have on land management
- determined by Aboriginal people
- shows the influence of cultural practices in landscape management
- will be different in different communities as cultural values are not singular.