Operationalising Aboriginal land and sea management

Since the Dreaming, Aboriginal peoples have cared for Country through holistic, relational systems of governance grounded in cultural Law/Lore, kinship and ceremony. These knowledge systems have sustained biodiversity, cultural identity, and community wellbeing across New South Wales (NSW) for thousands of generations. Today, caring for Country practices offer critical insights and capabilities to address contemporary environmental challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss and increasing frequency and severity of natural hazards. In response to widespread calls for Aboriginal-led land and sea management, the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW), in partnership with Natural Hazards Research Australia (the Centre) and Aboriginal practitioners, undertook a statewide research project to understand the conditions necessary to support scalable, Aboriginal community-led caring for Country. The project is called Operationalising Aboriginal land and sea management. However, on advice from Aboriginal practitioners these practices became referred to as caring for Country in later communications. The research explored the alignment of Aboriginal knowledge and management systems with existing policy and land management structures and identified ways to enable caring for Country practices at a landscape-scale across NSW.

Through literature review, policy analysis and extensive yarning with Aboriginal Elders, land managers, rangers and community leaders, the research revealed both persistent barriers and substantial opportunities. Barriers included fragmented governance, short-term project funding, policy tokenism and marginalisation of women’s leadership. Aboriginal rights remain under-implemented, and cultural obligations are often excluded from land management frameworks. Despite these barriers, the project highlighted strong community aspirations, cultural resilience and deep place-based knowledge. Aboriginal communities are transitioning from land rights to land use, asserting their responsibilities as cultural custodians and leading innovative, relational approaches to conservation and healing Country. NSW Government initiatives, such as Aboriginal ranger programs, joint management reforms and Treaty development are very positive steps but also require sustained investment and structural change.

The key insights of the research findings were used to design and preliminarily test policy barrier identification and remediation to support government, institutions, land managers and partner organisations identify and resolve barriers to caring for Country. The tool encourages two-way or two-eyed seeing approaches which are frameworks for knowledge-sharing and collaboration that value both Indigenous and western ways of knowing. Integrating Aboriginal perspectives alongside western frameworks helps to uncover biases and hidden assumptions that may exclude or misrepresent Aboriginal relationships with Country. The policy tool can be used as a diagnostic tool for existing policies and during policy design in conjunction with two-eyed seeing methods to reveal hidden assumptions and evaluate unintended policy impacts and barriers to caring for Country.

The key recommendations are:

• embedding Aboriginal, especially women’s, governance and cultural authority in all levels of decision making by recognising kinship, obligations and spiritual relationships to Country
• true reform that acknowledges Aboriginal obligations to care for Country as valid and lawful, not just as symbolic rights
• long-term, flexible and culturally grounded funding is also essential to support intergenerational knowledge transfer, cultural and spiritual practice, Aboriginal-defined economic models and holistic wellbeing as integral to caring for Country.

Together the project’s insights, recommendations, communication and support tools lay the foundation for a transformative shift toward Aboriginal-led, culturally grounded caring for Country across NSW, guided by deep biocultural knowledge systems and enduring partnerships.