Considering the Triple Bottom Line of Good Governance
Governments around the world are gradually recognizing and acknowledging that historical and existing models of government relations with Indigenous peoples have not worked and that new approaches are urgently needed. Good governance, almost everyone agrees, is
Considering the Triple Bottom Line of Good Governance
Governments around the world are gradually recognizing and acknowledging that historical and existing models of government relations with Indigenous peoples have not worked and that new approaches are urgently needed. Good governance, almost everyone agrees, is the absolute foundation of locally controlled and effective social, economic, political and cultural development. Standard Western models of government, typically judged by financial metrics and bottom-line accounting procedures, do not fit well with Indigenous needs and aspirations. New approaches, tied to broader evaluations of effectiveness and built off of “triple bottom line” thinking, are urgently needed if there is to be genuine improvement and meaningful power sharing with Indigenous peoples.
The realization of the importance of innovative, culturally-sensitive approaches is not new. Franz Fanon, the Algerian psychologist and intellectual leader of the decolonization movements of the 1960s and 1970s, wrote in 1963:
the healing and re-development of the ‘fourth world’ must not be modeled on the existing 