Collaboration on Country: Participatory Evaluation of the Girringun Indigenous Protected Areas

The Girringun Aboriginal Corporation is defined by innovative, experimental Indigenous collaborative governance. This is demonstrated through existing research and the recent declaration of the Girringun Indigenous Protected Areas. This research project, developed collaboratively with Girringun is also embedded in and engages with this context in multiple ways. Employing a participatory action oriented approach, this project implements a collaborative evaluation process with a sample of Indigenous Protected Area partner organisations. This thesis employs a reflexive account of full immersion fieldwork to explore agency and transformation and its effect on the researcher and the research participants. The research project and the organisations and individuals it has engaged with have delivered three distinct but entangled outcomes: research training, an appropriate and endorsed evaluation process, and the emergent outcome of a baseline partnership snapshot. The evaluation process is framed as a two-step process where first, individual interviews, and facilitated self-reflection occur, and second a facilitated workshop supports the co-production of knowledge and social learning The partnership snapshot explores the themes of information sharing, resource capacity, intercultural cultural capacity, and on-ground delivery. Amongst a community of policy entrepreneurs and individuals determined to make it ‘work’, this project makes an action contribution to the collaborative governance of the Girringun Indigenous Protected Areas