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What matters? Policy driven evidence, Indigenous government and the Harvard Project
Martin Mowbray
Charles Darwin University
Contact Email: martin.mowbray
cdu.edu.au
Evidence driven policy is a familiar refrain; its use is to suggest that policy-making is based on science rather than ideology. It has become commonplace for people in government to quote the empirical work of high profile academics as guiding their thinking about health, social policy and governance. Perhaps the most cited of such researchers is Professor Robert Putnam of Harvard University. However, use of such research findings is not necessarily accompanied by attention to either their foundations or their international transferability.
In the current discourse on Indigenous governance in Australia, frequent use is made of research conducted in the context of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development. The Harvard Project's composite cliché is 'sovereignty matters', 'institutions matter' and 'culture matters'. With the possible exception of 'leadership' and 'strategic thinking', everything else - including government expenditure - is secondary at best. In fact, the Harvard Project principals are on record as claiming that other than effective self-government 'nothing else has worked.' This is despite serious questions about the validity of the Harvard Project findings. As with Putnam's work on social capital, this leads to other questions and hypotheses about the reasons for the popularity of their claims.
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Copyright © 2007 Social Policy Research Centre.
