Complicating dynamics

This chapter provides an overview of the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework and focuses on how this tool has been used in developing country contexts and its limited application to Indigenous Australia and discusses how the tool was adapted to suit the case study context. The chapter reflects on the value that international development tools can bring to Indigenous contexts, but how flexibility is needed in how different tools are applied to Indigenous contexts. It describes a remote Aboriginal settlement in central Australia, Engawala. In an Australian Indigenous context, the external institutional context is especially crowded and fragmented, in line with the quantum of public financing. To further complicate matters, this external institutional environment in Engawala specifically, and Indigenous Australia more broadly, is largely supply driven, with external conceptualisations of social problems and their solutions. Considerable adaptation was necessary to both assets and vulnerabilities to successfully apply the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to an Australian Indigenous context.