Editorial reflections on Indigenous economic practices of contestation, resistance and wellbeing

The right to economic development has become a core area of international human rights debate (Balakrishnan, Heintz & Elson, 2016). It is often argued that economic development is vital for the full realisation of human freedom and should be a core criterion on which to judge our capacity to produce outcomes for valuable human ends (Sen, 1999). Economic development, its potential to eradicate extreme forms of poverty alongside its generative capacity to promote human flourishing, is now integrated into the normative framework of human wellbeing (UNDP, 2015), culminating in global instruments such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the United Nations Human Development Index. Economic development is also posited to be a vehicle for achieving self-determination among Indigenous peoples (e.g. Alfred, 2009; Loomis, 2000). Indeed, the United Nations lists the right to the ‘improvement of economic and social conditions’ within the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007), suggesting that economic development is a fundamental human right. Yet for Indigenous peoples, the right to economic development is highly contested. Globally, the available empirical evidence strongly suggests that the right to economic development, as currently framed, continues to actively undermine the fundamental principles of Indigenous freedom, resulting in devastatingly low levels of Indigenous wellbeing (see Silburn et al., 2016). Moreover, rather than economic development enabling Indigenous capability and flourishing, it appears to be denying Indigenous peoples those rights of cultural integrity, political equality and self-governance (UNDRIP, 2007). In white-settler societies in particular, such as Australia, national governments foreground the nation’s right to economic development above all rights. In turn, dispossession of Indigenous peoples’ land for global mining markets, the winding back of Indigenous welfare programs with the onset of neoliberal workfare conditionality, alongside harsh austerity measures that reframe Indigenous governance structures, organisations and programs around the ethos of capitalist economic development values, appear as a continuance of colonisation through new forms of economic paternalism. For Indigenous peoples, there remains an inherent tension in placing economic development as a precursor for self-determination, with many Indigenous leaders and scholars arguing that participation in economic development, as currently framed, is akin to assimilation (Dockery, 2010).