Project Description
This project will play a role in providing Seqwater with knowledge to progress the implementation of its RAP through being able to diagnose and improve its cultural capability with regards the ATSI peoples whose country the Seqwater operational area intersects with. The project will, through involving and providing training to Seqwater staff, progress the development of cultural capability across its operations and, through involving representatives of ATSI peoples whose Country intersects with the supply area of the organisation, lay foundations for partnerships to be formed in later stages of the Seqwater RAP – the Commit and Act stages.
Project Personnel and Beneficiaries
Griffith University, Seqwater are the partners involved in this project.
Outcomes to Date
Project has only just commenced.
Project Significance
“The positive outcomes of better reflecting ATSI people in water planning and management processes are many-fold, including improved inclusion in decision-making, better protection and management of ATSI cultural values through frameworks such as cultural flows, better access to economic opportunities and development for ATSI peoples and businesses, improved equity of access to water services, building capacity in ATSI peoples and their representative organisations and the opportunity to incorporate ATSI peoples knowledge and science into planning, even to the extent for example of co-designing catchment and river management plans.
The importance of developing cultural capability in individual staff members and more broadly within water policy, planning and management organisations in Queensland has been recently recognised . Seqwater itself has recognised within its organisational Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) the need to discover more about how to foster and maintain lasting, and positive partnership relationships with the range of ATSI peoples within its operational area. This process of discovery has both internal and external dimensions:
• Externally Seqwater needs to learn more generally about how to foster and maintain partnerships with ATSI peoples – what this means in terms of cultural capability and how to develop it e.g. organisational processes and practices, individual knowledge and skills for cultural engagement and collaboration;
• Externally Seqwater also needs to learn more about how to develop a mature cultural capability to partner with the specific ATSI peoples within its operational area, and;
• Internally Seqwater needs to learn about the current maturity of its own cultural capability and how to develop it both generally and specifically with regards existing ATSI partnerships and partnerships yet to be nurtured”