Decolonizing conservation? Australian government discourses on the Indigenous Protected Areas program 2000

Abstract

Indigenous nature conservation programs are lauded as a step towards decolonizing nature. Created in 1997, Australia's Indigenous Protected Areas program has produced the world's largest Indigenous conservation estate. Yet little research has critically explored exactly how the program aligns the interests of Indigenous peoples with the settler colonial state and nature conservation actors. We address that gap here by using a Foucauldian discourse analysis of power relations and related priorities by reference to seven federal government Indigenous Protected Areas program factsheets published from 2000 to 2023. Our analysis identifies three subject positions in this discourse: the enabling and financially responsible post-colonial state; the tax-paying non-Indigenous stakeholder; and the contributing and self-determining Indigenous citizen. These positions highlight the complexity of the program, and the constraints imposed on it by ongoing legacies of colonialism. We document how dominant political-economic and settler colonial interests work through scientific knowledge and institutional arrangements to seek to advance Indigenous self-determination while decentering Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, being and doing. Our findings underscore the need to make visible and questionable the power relations that operate in settler colonial programs claiming to empower Indigenous peoples. Doing so is vital to conserve Country and honour Indigenous peoples in ways that truly advance decolonization.

Keywords

Decolonization discourse analysis Indigenous peoples nature conservation neoliberal governance

Introduction

Indigenous conserved and protected area programs bring Indigenous peoples, the state and nature conservation¹ actors together through what are presented as convergent interests. Australia's Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) program is a prominent, widely celebrated example of such a program. In this article, we examine factsheets about the IPA program periodically published by the Australian government [hereafter also federal government] from 2000 to 2023 during which the IPA estate grew prodigiously. Our analysis of this governmental discourse regards these documents as an exercise of power that brings select objective and subjective realities into being. In studying the power relations that constitute the IPA program and those created through it, we ask about the relationship between governmental discourse about the IPA program and the legacies, institutions, and imperatives of the settler colonial state. Our findings are intended to inform and advance the political work of decolonizing nature conservation, in Australia and elsewhere.

The program establishes individual IPAs using voluntary agreements with Indigenous communities who primarily hold native or other land title and provides federal government funding for planning and management activities for biodiversity and cultural resource protection. The program has been declared by government a policy success for advancing nature conservation while promoting Indigenous peoples’ development via the Indigenous Advancement and Closing the Gap strategies (Minister Burney, 2024). A bipartisan consensus on this success is evident in funding commitments by successive governments. The objective growth of the IPA program is striking. In 1997, when both the National Reserve System (NRS) and the IPA program were introduced, less than 8% of terrestrial Australia was protected for conservation, almost entirely on public lands (Commonwealth of Australia, 1998). By 2024, the NRS encompassed over 22% of the continent, with three-quarters of this growth coming from IPAs (Commonwealth of Australia, 2024). As of December 2025, 95 IPAs had been declared, with 26 more being under consultation (Figure 1). The IPA estate's remarkable growth has enabled the Australian government to meet and exceed its international Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) targets and prompted a new target of 30% of lands and waters in protected areas by 2030 (Cooke et al., 2022).

Figure 1.

The IPA program in Australia showing declared and consultation projects, as well as other protected areas and other Indigenous owned, managed or co-managed land (for interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the Web version of this article). Map produced by Environmental Data and Analysis Branch, Australian Government Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Waters. ^© Commonwealth of Australia, February 2025).

We agree with established findings about the benefits of the program for Indigenous peoples (Barber and Jackson, 2017). Nevertheless, the program's complexity is poorly understood with respect to its political origins and effects on Indigenous–state relations. Little critical attention has been paid to either the IPA program's governmental contexts and rationalities or to how they gain public expression (see though Fache, 2014; Murdock, 2016). To address that gap, we offer a discourse analysis of seven, short, publicly accessible factsheets about the program produced by the federal government. These documents are distinctive in offering a highly condensed governmental account of the IPA program for the purposes of wide public dissemination of its achievements. Our focus on factsheets is part of a broader research agenda that includes analyses of other genres of government documents related to the program (Schofield et al., 2026).

We aim to critically assess claims that governmental approaches to the IPA program advance decolonization. While our focus is on governmental approaches to the IPA program, we recognize Indigenous peoples, and other actors may advance decolonization through effects of the IPA program despite, rather than with, government. Our work is in keeping with an assertion by van Holstein and Head (2018: 51) that “normalised ways of thinking about indigeneity and environments contribute directly to the articulation of political agendas”. Our guiding question is: how and with what effects is the IPA program discursively constructed in government factsheets between 2000 and 2023? We unsettle any self-evident objectifications in the factsheets using an approach to discourse analysis indebted to Carol Bacchi and colleagues Jennifer Bonham (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014) and Susan Goodwin (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016), and their application of insights drawn from Foucault (1972).

Scrutinizing governmental discourse of the IPA program matters for geographers and those in allied disciplines and professions for three reasons. First, the program directly shapes public investment in and management of 13% of the Australian continent. Second, the program has enabled Australia to rapidly meet international nature conservation commitments with arguably minimal disruption to economic agendas of development (Cooke et al., 2022). Third, the program forms a centrepiece of federal Indigenous advancement policy, in conjuction with the Indigenous Ranger program (Mackie and Meacheam, 2016). We thereby build on a rich but limited theoretical literature on critical, including discursive, evaluations of the IPA program (Concu and May, 2013; Moorcroft, 2016; Murdock, 2016; Zurba et al., 2019) and contribute to wider inquiry about the politics of decolonization in settler colonial contexts (Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Next we provide an overview of the intersections of settler colonialism and nature conservation, before turning our attention to the origins of Australia's IPA programme. Then, we outline our methodology in three parts: we explain our use of the concept of discursive practices; assess the factsheet as a genre, including its purpose, use and production; and outline methods of analysis we applied to factsheets. Thereafter, we present the results of our discourse analysis in terms of three themes: cultures of conservation science; political economies of conservation; and governing Country. The ensuing discussion centres on the production of three subject positions and is followed, in the Conclusion, by a summary of significant findings and suggestions for new research directions.

Intersections of settler colonialism and nature conservation – ideas and concepts

Nature conservation as a scientific and managerial agenda of government is deeply entangled with colonial and settler colonial histories (Dowie, 2009; Tauli-Corpuz et al., 2020). Sharing a series of meshed dualisms, colonial projects explicitly sought to subordinate the uncivilized Other—including particular humans and nature. This colonizer-colonized power relation legitimized the extraction of nature and exploitation of colonized people. The emergence of national parks and protected areas in the Nineteenth Century drew directly from colonial power to use the conservation of nature to justify the dispossession of Indigenous peoples in many parts of the world (Dowie, 2009).

In settler colonial states, colonizers “come to stay” (Wolfe, 1994: 96) and their project is “territorially acquisitive in perpetuity” (Coulthard, 2014: 152). The possessive and extractive nature of settler colonization relies on a territorial logic through which “land is remade into property and human relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property” (Tuck and Yang, 2012: 5). Because of this remaking, “[e]pistemological, ontological, and cosmological relationships to land are interred, indeed made pre-modern and backward. Made savage” (ibid.). Discourses of civilizational destiny provided the self-justification for colonial powers to go about their ‘civilizing’ mission of controlling land and Indigenous peoples through “extermination, expulsion, incarceration, containment, and assimilation” (Veracini, 2011: 2).

In Australia, dispossession of Indigenous peoples progressed through the doctrine of terra nullius—the existence of ‘land belonging to no one’. The doctrine was crucial for the authority of the British Crown in the new colony, vesting in itself ownership of the continent and the sole right to alienation by virtue of the act of ‘discovery’. As Governor Bourke of New South Wales asserted in his 1835 proclamation: Aboriginal peoples’ “right to alienate” land, via contracts or treaty with settlers, was refused owing to the fact recognition of this right would “subvert the foundation on which all proprietary rights [in the colony] … rest” (Bourke, 1835). The doctrine also subordinated Indigenous peoples as uncivilised and primitive inhabitants who were claimed by the land and incapable of possessing it.

In settler colonial contexts, protected area conservation emerged as an extension of efforts to deny the cultural legitimacy of Indigenous presence as part of justifying their dispossession. This led to widespread creation of “conservation territories” (Zimmerer, 2000) that advanced the “liquidation of Indigenous people” (Wolfe, 2006: 388) in the Anglophone settler societies of North America and Australasia in particular. Discourses of wilderness and of nationalism were fused tightly in this process of conservation as settler colonialism (Langton, 1996; Neumann, 2004; Spence, 1999). This discursive erasure of Indigenous worlds and territorial installation of the nation is exemplified in the making of Yellowstone in the United States in 1870: “This great wilderness does not belong to us. It belongs to the nation. Let us make a public park of it and set it aside … never to be changed but to be kept sacred always” (Cornelius Hedge, 1870, quoted in Harper and White, 2012: 54).

As “a structure not an event” (Wolfe, 2006: 388), the ongoing settler colonial drive for land, resources and elimination persists in the present. Settler state governments have increasingly adopted progressive language and programs, but the underlying discursive practices and agenda of legitimating the settler presence has not substantially shifted. Thus seemingly progressive state projects continue, albeit in a modified way, the work of coloniality. The constrained reality of Native Title in Australia provides one example of how apparent advances in Indigenous recognition can further ensnare Indigenous lives in settler colonial institutions (Howlett and Lawrence, 2019; Povinelli, 2002; Ritter, 2009). While actively seeking to denounce the earlier role of nature conservation in Indigenous dispossession, contemporary forms of nature conservation similarly continue to be shaped by logics of coloniality (Gelves-Gomez et al., 2024). The ways in which the IPA program may be similarly embedded in the self-evident schemas of settler colonialism and its subjectivities thus requires greater attention.

The origins of the IPA program

Interest in creating an IPA program in Australia emerged in the early 1990s in the context of discourse of ‘ecologically sustainable development’ that linked environmental protection with economic development (Harding, 2006; Moffatt, 1992). The Australian Government became a signatory to the CBD in 1992 at the United Nations’ Earth Summit. The Earth Summit's agenda for sustainable development contributed to a paradigm shift in protected area conservation (Stevens, 2014) that challenged the dualistic assumption in Western societies that nature was best protected by separating it from people (Brockington, 2002; Büscher and Fletcher, 2020; Cronon, 1996). As part of this shift, the 1992 World Congress on National Parks and Protected Areas declared that “protected areas can actively benefit people everywhere and should therefore be considered an important part of the sustainable development process” (IUCN, 1993: 18).

In 1992, decades of Indigenous activism for land rights culminated in the recognition of Native Title by the Australian High Court in the Mabo v State of Queensland decision.² Prime Minister Keating (1993: 4793) observed of “Mabo … [that it was] an historic turning point, the basis for a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Aboriginal Australians”. A crucial part of the activism that preceded the Mabo decision were joint management arrangements established in the 1970s and 1980s between Indigenous peoples and government in national parks. Those placed Australia at “the forefront of the international shift to recognize indigenous rights in national parks” (Harper and White, 2012: 64).

The NRS, created in the 1990s as part of Australia's commitment to the CBD, provided a scientific basis for asserting the crucial importance of Indigenous lands for biodiversity conservation (Davison et al., 2023; Smyth and Sutherland, 1996). The science was reinforced by growing recognition in “policy debates” of Indigenous practices of caring for Country as an “Aboriginal model of land management” (Pleshet, 2018: 187). In this context, Thackway et al. (1996: 25) described how the IPA program arose from efforts to develop a mechanism to achieve “national objectives and support Indigenous land management aspirations”. In 1995, the IPA concept received “qualified support” from “major Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organizations and conservation agencies in each state and territory” (Smyth and Sutherland, 1996: 96–97). A national Indigenous working group was then created to broker between the federal government and Indigenous landholders to pilot and test the idea of an IPA program (ibid).

The IPA program can be understood as a government solution to a threefold governance problem. The first is a need to demonstrate progress in nature conservation to domestic and international constituencies. A second is the need to match domestic political aspirations about ending entrenched Indigenous disadvantage with measurable steps towards Indigenous empowerment (Moorcroft, 2016). A third is the need to resolve ‘green-Black’ conflicts that position Indigenous interests and land rights in opposition to environmentalism (Vincent and Neale, 2016) and create political risks for governments perceived to be attending to one at the expense of the other.

Despite the complexity of the problem it is intended to address, the program has been evaluated favourably. As early as 2003, Samantha Muller (2003: 29) suggested that Australia's IPA program contributes to decolonization of protected area management. Shortly after, prominent Yiman Indigenous scholar Marcia Langton and colleagues declared that IPAs “are delivering significant benefits to indigenous peoples in Australia” (Langton et al., 2005: 43). Austin et al. (2019: 164) observed that Australia's IPA network is shaping opportunities for deeper and broader partnerships among stakeholders that are “both world's best practice and effective at producing multiple outcomes for multiple stakeholders with diverse values”. These accolades have continued as the IPA estate has grown rapidly, with Bellchambers (2023: 50) suggesting that IPAs are rooted in community-driven action and are “a powerful mechanism for Indigenous people to govern Country in culturally legitimate and adaptive ways”.

Methodology

Our study of government discourse associated with the IPA program focuses on the genre of the factsheet as an instrument of both communication and governance. By making claim to self-evident realities and through the genre's authoritative register, we treat factsheets as sites of meaning making and world-making. In studying world-making, we consider how powerful “systems of meaning … [and] … intertwined myths contribute to sustain settler colonialism” (Ring, 2025: 1). We approach factsheets as legitimate knowledge formed within the prevailing discursive order (Foucault, 1972). We focus our attention on IPA program factsheets as a sample of Australian government statements, evaluating the discursive world-making to which this program belongs.

We analyse the timeseries of factsheets guided by specific interpretations of Foucault's approach to power (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014, 2016; Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016; Bonham and Bacchi, 2017; Bonham et al., 2015). Our focus is on discursive practices as multiple and multi-sited practices of producing both knowledge and reality. We thereby shift emphasis “from ‘real’ things to the strategic relations [rules of formation] that produce something as ‘real’” (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014: 183). As Bacchi and Bonham (2014: 174) explain, Foucault's analysis of discursive practices “showed how knowledge is formed in the interaction of plural and contingent practices within different sites, each of which involves the material and the symbolic”. Building on Foucault's analysis of discursive power, we draw from material semiotics to consider discursive practices as a form of world-making that weave more-than-human webs of relations ( Bacchi and Bonham, 2014; Law, 1994; Law, 2023; Mol, 2002). Both Foucauldian approaches and material semiotics involve recognizing that “knowledge traditions are performative, helping to create the realities that they describe … [so] that realities (including objects and subjects) and representations of those realities are being enacted or performed simultaneously” (Law, 2008: 635). We thus approach IPA factsheets as sites of knowledge formation that allow us to grasp the systematic relations that constitute the IPA program through objects, subjects, concepts, strategies, and procedures.

Little scholarly attention has been paid to factsheets. This “humble genre” (Bazerman, 1997: 298) is easily overlooked in discourse analysis in favour of texts that are longer and more formal, prominent, or official, and thereby perceived to be richer sources of meaning. Yet factsheets are a discursive structure of political importance because of their unique register and distinctive world-making effects which are created through the field (the subject matter), tenor (the social roles being enacted), and mode (the manner of communication) (Halliday, 2009).

Factsheets are a subgenre of the informational text genre. Key features of informational texts are they rely “primarily on exposition rather than narration” and are “non-linear”, where “their major point of organization centres on a process or phenomenon” (Fisher et al. 2016: 70). The process or the phenomenon then make up the field of the document in informational texts. The tenor of informational texts is “typically authoritative and may be somewhat socially distant … and [writers] of informational texts may convey their expertise through the accuracy of the text and may also adopt a stance that does or does not allow the reader to disagree with the text” (ibid: 71).

As a subgenre of informational texts, factsheets have a particular mode. The mode can be defined by its brevity, usually over one or two pages, such that they contain “the most relevant information about a particular subject in the least amount of space. The goal is to provide facts and key points about a topic in a clear, concise, and easy-to-understand way” (Cubon-Bell, 2019: 1). Factsheets often use bullet points, headings, short paragraphs, and graphics to reinforce information. As a condensed mode of communication, the genre is highly crafted, such that what is left out is as important as what is included. Despite the crafting required, compared with other policy documents, factsheets appear a relatively low cost and low energy form of bureaucratic practice.

Regarding our sample of factsheets, the field is the IPA program. Factsheets work to define the program and its parameters—that which can be said about the program and that which cannot. This power to define also relates to the tenor of factsheets. Embedded in the institutional practices of government and Australia's liberal democracy, factsheets are authored, authorized, and legitimized within specific governmental processes and institutional dynamics (Young, 2001). There is a distinct tenor between author and reader: as producer of the program and factsheets, the government has an authoritative “author function” (Foucault, 1977: 125) and a symbolic power, where factsheets “cannot come from anybody” (Foucault, 1972: 56). Factsheets then are given an author-value, such that they are a “speech that must be received in a certain mode and that, in a given culture, must receive a certain status” (Foucault, 1998: 211).

As “institutional apparatus” (Young, 2001: 402) factsheets project the objective reality of IPAs, describing in an apparently neutral way the facts of the matter. These documents are distinctive in their condensed and pedagogical form intended for quick and easy digestion by a wide public audience with little or no prior knowledge about the program. As an exercise in discursive power, factsheets seamlessly integrate the aims of describing the IPA program and establishing its meaning for all Australians.

Regarding these shared meanings, despite the informational text genre focusing on exposition rather than narration or persuasion, and despite their reference to facts, we do not take the realities brought into being through these discursive practices for granted. Indebted to Blaser (2009), we approach facts critically as “factishes” (Latour, 1999: 266–276). Factishes are claims “in which objectivity and subjectivity (and, therefore, nature, culture, morality, and politics) are entangled with each other in an indissoluble knot because “facts” are both real and done—or, better, they are real because they are being done” (Blaser, 2009: 11). Factsheets, then, are active, material practices of governing that bring the IPA program into being in particular ways. The program's role in creating a now vast IPA estate across Australia reminds us that this governmental project is an entirely concrete form of world-making.

Methods

To identify federal government factsheets on the IPA program, we used the Australian National Library aggregate search engine, Trove, to search the Australian Government Web Archive (gov.au web domains). We searched “Indigenous Protected Area*” AND “factsheet” to locate webpages of the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (including under its previous names); the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet; the National Indigenous Australians Agency. We then used the internet archive ‘Wayback Machine’ to review webpage archives and identify factsheets. We excluded factsheets of individual IPA case studies as our focus in this paper was knowledge making and dissemination at the program level. To confirm our search was complete, we confirmed with the National Library of Australia in November 2023 and the federal government IPA program team in May 2024.

Seven program-level factsheets were identified, dated 2000, 2001, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2015, and 2023.³ These span all but the program's first three years. The 2006, 2008, and 2010 factsheets are very similar with small differences in the text: for example, updated information on the number of IPAs and size of the IPA estate. We can assume that these five years represent a period of stability for the program and recognize the pragmatics of factsheet production within poorly resourced departments. We also observe, in the Results, that ‘cut and paste’ repetition serves to embed dominant ways of understanding IPA objects, subjects and spaces.

Regarding format: the 2000 and 2001 factsheets are one-page documents with an opening section headed “Indigenous Protected Areas”, followed by descriptions of the declared IPAs at that point. The 2000 factsheet contains no images; the 2001 factsheet contains one. The 2000 factsheet includes a border of Aboriginal artwork attributed to Theresa Ardler.⁴ Factsheets produced from 2006 to 2023 are visually similar (see Figure 2 as an example). All are two-pages, each page divided into two columns with text under headings. These factsheets are visually rich, each containing three photographs, and the 2015 factsheet includes a map. All incorporate stylistic designs and borders. The 2006, 2008, and 2010 factsheet borders incorporate Aboriginal artwork attributed to Eunice Nungarrayi Woods.⁵ The 2015 and 2023 factsheets have borders with cross-hatching styles similar to Aboriginal art motifs but have no artist attributions.

Figure 2.

Page 1 (of 2) of the 2015 factsheet. Factsheet produced by the Australian Government, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. ^© Commonwealth of Australia 2020. Image ^© Peter Morris 2015.

To begin the discourse analysis, the lead author completed and shared with other authors close and repeated readings of the factsheets. We thought about the factsheets’ field, tenor, and mode (Fisher, Frey and Lapp, 2016; Halliday, 2009) and about “Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect?” (Lasswell, 1948: 37).

Guided first by Foucault, we then coded factsheets in multiple rounds of deeper reading, looking for ideas, categories, and concepts at work in the text (Hajer, 1995) and considering how these were “constructing” the program (Riley, Robson and Evans, 2021: 296; Tappin, Riley and Morison, 2024). Guided next by Bacchi and Bonham's (2016) method, we asked “how was it or is it possible to say those things?” (ibid: 116). What are the key discourses, and what norms, subjects, objects, and places are produced through them? And, as important, what is made absent or is unsayable? We focus on the “interpretive and conceptual schemas” (Bacchi, 2005: 199) that discursively produce the IPA program through the factsheets. This distinguishes our analysis from linguistic analyses such as a critical discourse analysis or text analytics. Our analysis of the “things said” was done at the same time as we examined the factual mode through which they were said.

Finally, we considered what has been brought into being in factsheets as knowledge practices, and asked what are we bringing into being through our knowledge practices? It has been imperative that we reflect on our theoretical ambitions as non-Indigenous scholars committed to Indigenous sovereignty and decolonization, working within academic discursive practices.

Results

The IPA Program began as an experiment whose ongoing iteration has depended on government and stakeholder perception of its success. The first two factsheets were published in 2000 and 2001—two and three years after the start of the program. They reported on the success of eight, then 13 experimental pilot projects. The two offer descriptive case studies and are proof-of-concept communications, showing the program's feasibility and promise. When the 2006 factsheet was released, there were 20 IPAs, and from that point the factsheet form shifted away from the importance of individual IPAs toward the growing network of IPAs as a whole. From 2006, policy-makers were able to be confident that Indigenous communities were willing to enter into voluntary IPA agreements, and thus that the program could align two highly contested and conflicting policy areas. This confidence is evident in the shift in factsheets from simple description to definitional work that established the self-evident reality of the program using headings such as “What is an IPA?” or “What does an IPA manager do?” or “How do IPAs work?” (emphasis added). Later factsheets also show increasing emphasis on the program's demonstratable benefits for nature, the economy, and community. In this way, factsheets reveal a strengthening governmental certainty. Demonstrating an understanding that, through time, there will be more IPAs, more hectares added to the NRS, more funding, jobs, and partnerships.

Our analysis elucidated three themes in factsheets that construct the material-semiotic realities of the IPA program: (1) cultures of conservation science, (2) political economies of conservation, and (3) governing County.

Theme 1: Cultures of conservation science

Factsheets present as self-evident the separate if intersecting existence of nature and culture. This division, resting on a deeply embedded modern dualism (Latour, 1999; Law, 1994), assumes that science mediates nature, with culture treated as a matter of subjective value. Our analysis regards this discursive separation of nature and culture as itself an artefact of discursive practices that are inherently cultural; in this way, factsheets describe IPAs as having distinctly natural and cultural features.

Each factsheet from 2006 describes Indigenous peoples’ relationships to IPAs using the term “management”. Their active role caring for Country over tens of millennia is emphasized: “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians have managed their lands for tens of thousands of years” (2000) and “First Nations people have been managing land and sea Country for over 65,000 years” (2023). This phrasing accords to peoples a history of intention and interest in land erased in colonial legal doctrines and myths about primitive people on which the settler colonial Australian nation was founded.

Yet, at the same time, the precolonial history of management is transposed in the IPA Program into nature conservation's “practical work” (2000, 2001) as defined by modern scientific discourses. All factsheets thus constitute IPA practices as those in which managers work on the environment in terms of monitoring, pest control, revegetation, marine debris removal, and visitor management. To this list, the 2023 factsheet adds “‘right-way’ fire management”, reflecting recent settler colonial attention on Indigenous cultural burning practices. Practices identified as cultural work in the factsheets include “cultural site management” (2023) and protection of “rock art” (2006, 2008, 2010, 2015). Factsheets from 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2015 also refer to intangible cultural heritage in the form of “language projects” and “protection of … cultural history”. The latter suggests historical preservation rather than ongoing cultural practice. Images in the factsheets mostly depict managerial actions—we note that visual analysis of IPA documents is the subject of future work.

While all factsheets focus on managing Country, those from 2006, 2008, and 2010 ‘cut and paste’ an acknowledgement that for:

non-Indigenous Australians, the words ‘caring for country’ may suggest traditional land management and age old conservation practices. But for Indigenous Australians, the phrase means much more: a deep spiritual attachment to land, to creation beings, the plants and animals, to the source of rules for living and stories, dance, songs and art.

By such means, caring for Country is invested with layers of non-modern meaning while being rendered compatible with modern management using discursive practices of scientific knowledge production. The Indigenous cultural concept of Country becomes an object of conservation: ecosystems comprising identifiable, countable, and universally recognized components of biodiversity. This production of conservation territories is most evident in factsheets from 2000 and 2001 that describe those IPAs then declared, and include statements such as “Watarru and Walalkara are biologically significant areas” (2000, 2001).

As spaces of conservation, IPAs are objects of scientific expertise and sites to apply and produce scientific knowledge. For example, at Watarru and Walalkara IPAs, “Traditional landowners … have been working closely with scientists to understand more about the regions’ biology” (2000). In scientific accounting, IPAs are filled with biodiversity in ways distinct from, and that silence, other ideas about nature, Country, or relations of kinship. In the process, IPAs are constituted as exceptional spaces, ‘hotspots’ of biodiversity that house exceptional species and rare features of universal value to humanity as part of an Earthly inventory of life. The Watarru and Walalkara IPAs thus contain “the highest diversities of reptile species found anywhere in the world and support rare and endangered species” (2000, 2001). In the process, IPAs are discursively constituted within a specific western spatiotemporal ontology where—as bounded, stable and measurable entities—they are valued for their growing quantitative contributions to the NRS. Each factsheet diligently charts this spatial accumulation, recording the IPA estate at each time point as a quantity of millions of hectares.

Core practices of measurement in relation to biodiversity emphasize ongoing identification, monitoring, and managing, including in relation to “threatened species monitoring and protection … habitat restoration … biodiversity surveys” (2023). Such work necessarily involves biodiversity's opposite—“weeds and pest” (2023) and “feral” (2015) and “exotic” (2001) species, requiring “control” (2015). Management plans aligned with “international standards and guidelines” are highlighted across all seven factsheets, signalling the rational governance of species, threats, and spaces.

From 2006, earlier emphasis on a theoretical compatibility of Indigenous nature knowledge and science is transposed into a concrete focus on traditional ecological knowledge in partnership with science. For example, “Indigenous groups ‘care for Country’ using a combination of traditional Indigenous knowledge and contemporary western science” and “IPAs bring together traditional ecological knowledge and modern science for effective land management” (2008). The 2023 factsheet describes how the IPAs’ resources are protected by “applying First Nations ecological knowledge alongside western science.” Implicit here are claims about both the non-scientific and incomplete basis of traditional ecological knowledge and its ability to be disconnected from traditional knowledge holders so it can be “applied” in ways equivalent to modern science.

Theme 2: Political economies of conservation

Where Theme 1 focuses on the political effects of representations of knowledge, Theme 2 focuses on the political effects of representations of economic activity. IPA factsheets construct relationships between Indigenous peoples, Country and the nation-state by reference to embedded material-semiotic practices of capitalist economic value. Biodiversity is seen to constitute an asset, resource, and marketable commodity. As hotspots of biodiversity, IPAs are then constituted as sites of underutilized capitalist value to be realized through flows of investment that open conservation employment, markets, and partnerships—including with “universities; conservation organisations; the private sector; government agencies” (2023; originally a dot point list). These external partnerships are emphasized over partnerships between Indigenous peoples, which are referred to once in 2015.

Threatened and charismatic species are identified as significant assets within IPAs, notably in the 2023 factsheet, which contains a case study about “saving Australia's rarest bird”, the night parrot. In contrast, entities culturally important to Indigenous peoples are not identified. Instead, it is scientifically valuable species that transform and constitute Country as a valuable place. IPA participants are encouraged to maximize these assets and resources through entrepreneurial creativity, business enterprise, and tourism. For example, at Yalata IPA, a “business plan is being developed for a whale watching and associated ecotourism enterprise that has the potential to provide income for managing the IPA” (2000). This statement suggests an intention in the program to diversify revenue. Sources of capital other than from government to fund IPAs are identified in factsheets from 2006, 2008, and 2010, in which some IPAs “run tourism businesses or establish bush tucker nurseries for the manufacture and sale of Indigenous foods”. In 2023, the factsheet asserts that “IPA management plans encourage tourism, where appropriate. This [feature] gives all Australians the opportunity to learn about biodiversity and First Nations cultures”. Here, Indigenous peoples’ cultures and Country are formed as marketable and consumable assets. The economic transformations of Country enabled by modest government investment in IPAs are thereby connected to much larger flows of private capital, enabling government retreat in line with neoliberal governance strategies.

Shaped by neoliberal discourses of sustainable development, factsheets present win-win outcomes that benefit both conservation and economic development. As the 2015 factsheet explains, in “addition to the positive environmental benefits, IPAs also provide benefits in health, education, employment and social cohesion for Indigenous people” (emphasis added). Similarly, the 2015 and 2023 factsheets emphasize the international categorization of IPAs as a form of protected area that is designed to “promote a balance between conservation and other sustainable uses” to deliver “social, cultural and economic benefit” (2023).

Communities are understood as participating in the program, mirroring a language of participation prevalent in sustainable development and linked to empowerment and capacity building that assumes communities lack both power and skill. For example, factsheets from 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2015 ‘cut and paste’ how participants are “improving their capacity to manage natural and cultural resources”. The “spin-off” for Indigenous participants is, then, “a greater capacity to look after their own affairs coupled with recognition and respect from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities” (2008). Discourses of deficit are explicit across those quotes and the program's success emphasizes the assistance and opportunities given to Indigenous people instead of their achievements. For example, the opportunity for Indigenous peoples to participate in the economy is supposedly enabled by the program's training provision and “employment opportunities [that] build the capacity of Rangers and extend the range of services they can provide on a ‘fee for service’ basis and other commercial activities” (2015). Increased market participation is said “to decrease their dependency on government funding” (2015). Success is again partly constructed as government facilitation of market solutions enabling its retreat from more investment in Indigenous advantage.

The 2023 factsheet then shifts the emphasis of capacity building to climate change, first by noting that “Indigenous communities are amongst the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change”. Failing to identify the source of this vulnerability in social marginalization, the IPA program is celebrated as “an avenue for building resilience … strengthening Indigenous governance; two-way knowledge sharing; improving adaptive capacity” (2023; original a dot point list).

In line with governing capitalist logics, a lack of productivity is identified as the core barrier to be overcome in training and jobs. Factsheets stress how participants become educated and skilled through the program. Gaining education credentials is highlighted in 2006, 2008, and 2010 and linked to rural job creation from 2006 onwards. For example, IPAs “create jobs for Indigenous men and women doing what they want to do—working and looking after [C]ountry, particularly in remote locations where employment opportunities are limited” (2015). Enrolling implicit neoliberal tropes about unemployment as a partly self-inflicted condition, the 2008 factsheet asserts that “IPAs are in regions of high unemployment, so the rangers and managers become role models for their communities” (2008). The trope is similarly deployed in the 2015 factsheet to argue that by “being a positive community role model, Rangers also provide incentives for children to stay in school and further their education” (2015).

Success in IPAs is calculated using metrics of dominant economic value in Australia. For example, the 2015 factsheet emphasizes the cost-effectiveness of the program, while the 2023 factsheet outlines how the “economic and community outcomes” of the program “benefit the wider Australian community”. The 2023 factsheet states that in “2021–2022, around 754 First Nations people and 361 women were employed under the IPA program.” In it is also reference to reconciling and accounting the varied benefits and costs of IPAs where government is an investor focused on maximizing return and/or minimizing expenditure: “For every dollar invested in Indigenous Rangers, up to a 3-to-1 return on investment is generated”.

Finally, IPAs and their managers are constituted as nature conservation providers who benefit the common good. “IPAs safeguard biodiversity” and “the IPA program expansion has contributed greatly to Australia's world-class protected area network” (2023), and factsheets from 2008, 2010, and 2015 ‘cut and paste’ that IPAs are “protecting biodiversity for the benefit of all Australians”. In that manner, conservation in IPAs is constructed as a collective endeavour and a form of shared responsibility that benefits all Australians. Beyond Australia, IPAs also serve government responsibilities to global constituencies, so that IPAs “contribute to meeting Australia's international obligations … to the 30 by 30 target under the CBD” (2023).

Theme 3: Governing Country

Our final theme focuses on the political effects of representations of governance mechanisms, including those embedded in legal rights and agreements and in the territorial governance of space. As noted, IPAs are created in voluntary agreements with Indigenous communities to achieve management outcomes in return for funding, employment, and training. Factsheets foreground the claim that the program represents a collaboration between government and Indigenous peoples. Government is constituted as a supportive partner in statements such as: “The Australian Government and First Nations groups co-designed the Indigenous Protected Area program in 1997” (2023). Factsheets also highlight government's growing spending on the program (2006, 2008, 2010), with the latest also stating that the “Australian Government has committed $231.5 million to expand and improve the IPA program” (2023). That spending is linked in factsheets to how Indigenous peoples experience “real benefits” (2006, 2008, 2010), including by contributing to government's “efforts to strengthen outcomes … through the National Agreement on Closing the Gap” (2023).

Simultaneously, factsheets emphasize Indigenous communities’ willingness to “voluntarily dedicate” (2015) Country to the program. Doing so constitutes the program as inherently consultative and responsive to Indigenous interests and aspirations for self-determination and differentiates it from coercive or forced means long associated with Indigenous policy. For example, one way in which “Indigenous Australians are managing their cultural responsibility to care for country and to pass on their knowledge about the land and its resources for future generations is by participating” in the program (2000).

Yet situating the IPA program within global conservation frameworks and targets raises questions about Indigenous autonomy. Indeed, the single explicit reference to self-determination in the factsheets is juxtaposed with global governance: the program is “supporting First Nations people's right to self-determination under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples” (2023). Thus, while factsheets from 2000 to 2015 ‘cut and paste’ how IPAs are managed “in line with international standards”, the 2023 factsheet suggests they are managed “in line with Traditional owner objectives”. Asserting Indigenous control, this statement and earlier references to each IPA being “actively managed by its Indigenous owners” (2008, 2010) raise but do not answer an important question. Do dominant discursive practices associated with private property ownership in modern societies influence how traditional ownership is understood in the program? That government implicitly equates Indigenous self-determination with the autonomy afforded to private property owners in the IPA program is suggested by the claim that most “IPAs are born out of the desire of the Traditional Owners to protect the values of their land and to control its management” (2008).

Discussion

Guiding our foregoing analysis of the factsheets were questions about how the IPA program is produced discursively. We have shown that discursive structures in this neglected genre of documents centre dominant scientific cultures of nature, dominant political economies, and governmental power and policy. Through their characteristically condensed and digestible mode of description, factsheets form IPA spaces, objects, and subjects within frameworks that engage simple “common sense” ways of knowing, being, and doing in world, including in relation to “the environment … economic process, or social differences” (Waitt, 2005: 168).

IPAs emerges in factsheets as a powerful discursive practice of alignment to drive Indigenous empowerment and nature conservation in harness. Yet there is nothing self-evident about the alignment of the state, nature conservation and Indigenous peoples. Three political projects are not merely “framed” to align within the IPA program, as an interpretivist analysis may suggest (Bacchi and Goodwin, 2016: 39), but rather this program is discursively created as the solution to problems that are shared by all stakeholders. Problems of nature conservation and Indigeneity are constructed in the IPA program, then, through governmental discursive practices that “intervene in the relations of what can be known, said, or practiced” about both nature and Indigeneity (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2017: 120). Via governmental rules, institutions, networks, and authorities (Bacchi and Bonham, 2014) nature and Indigeneity are made “thinkable and governable” (Arribas-Ayllon and Walkerdine, 2017: 120).

The self-evident realities produced through factsheets create and order a series of normalized and governable entities: IPAs as valuable nature spaces; Country as a scientific object; and Indigenous cultures as future resources. These political entities in turn rely upon three subject positions produced in the factsheets: the enabling and financially responsible post-colonial state; the tax-paying non-Indigenous stakeholder; and the contributing and self-determining Indigenous citizen. These subject positions are produced despite the informational genre being a form of nonfiction focused on exposition rather than narration or characters. We discuss these subject positions in turn, integrating our insights with relevant research.

The enabling and financially responsible post-colonial state

The government is formed through the IPA program as an enabling subject of post-colonial possibilities. In their study of opportunities for increasing private investment in Indigenous land and sea conservation, Austin et al. (2019: 164) deemed the IPA program a success “due to the Australian Government's innovative strategy of taking Indigenous people and their country seriously as partners in producing win-win outcomes”. They argued this strategy moves beyond a “‘rights and responsibilities’ attitude” to become a collaborative approach to “maintain and bolster the social norms of local communities, reflect local values, and provide win-win outcomes” (ibid: 7). Our analysis shows how the assumed alignment here between the IPA program and local communities’ norms and values is produced in the factsheets through the naturalized constitution of IPAs as continuations of Indigenous peoples’ obligations to Country. This assertion of continuity between past Indigenous worlds, the present of the IPA program, and the future it aims to conserve is made possible by transposing and rendering compatible the social norms and local values of local communities with scientific cultures of nature, dominant economic practices, and nation state imperatives. The buried assumption that Indigenous cultures must be transposed to gain legitimacy and become investable reproduces the political reality that Indigenous peoples cannot be brought into the work of the settler colonial state on their own terms (Campion et al., 2024).

In naturalizing the program, the government emerges as an enabler of Indigenous desire and facilitator of their self-determination. Equally, the program is understood as a progression of historical practice for which the government can take credit. It is constituted as something more—an opportunity to improve productivity, address unemployment, realize underutilized capitalist value and gain financial independence. The government then sits between dependent and independent Indigenous subjects, enabling the self-realised/actualized subject/citizen/community in the post-colonial state.

This enabling state subject position is established in factsheet discourse in the context of neoliberalism and new public management. Within this context, environmental and Indigenous public policy domains have been subsumed under market-oriented imperatives. Despite successive governments funding the program, as with most government initiatives demand outstrips five-year funding cycles and long-term government funding is uncertain. A vital reality kept hidden in factsheets is that IPAs are funded well below that given to other protected areas (Kirkpatrick et al., 2022). As Smyth (2001: 89) observed: “IPAs are attractive to government conservation agencies because they effectively add to the nation‘s conservation estate without the need to acquire the land, and without the cost of establishing all the infrastructure … of a conventional national park”. Here, again, the government enables minimal investment and facilitates the (re)making of Country via specific and constrained measures of value (Peck and Tickell, 2002). This strategy is said to empower IPA communities to find their way in the conservation market and pursue economic independence. In that vein, Muller (2014: 137) pointed to how “the rhetoric of the importance of Indigenous rangers is … not commensurate with funding for their operations”. At the same time, IPA communities are constituted such that they are “born to do business with nature” (Verran, 2009: 17). And over the span of the factsheets, ENGOs have increasingly funded Indigenous Caring for Country projects (Austin et al., 2019; Cooke, Pearce and Davison, 2024) bringing this neoliberal reality into being. Recognition of Indigenous rights and the associated devolution of services to facilitate Indigenous independence neatly coincide with neoliberal processes of decentralization, shrinking state services, and fiscal offloading via privatisation in the delivery of public goods—in this case nature conservation.

The tax-paying non-Indigenous stakeholder

Government resourcing of the IPA program has been shaped by a neoliberal logic of a return of investment that must be financially accountable to taxpayers. Financial value accounting is thus used to reconcile and justify the program's varied benefits and costs (Social Ventures Australia, 2016). Providing evidence that the program is a sound investment constitutes the government as a provider in relation to its citizens. It can take credit for the program's success and benefits—namely the procurement of cost-effective nature conservation and associated “spin off” paybacks. Factsheets, then, are addressed to the audience subject of customers with a direct stake in the public services provided by the IPA program. Accountability is provided to them by embedding the program within the authority of the IUCN, “international standards”, and the language of conservation science and management plans. All those signal the rational governance of species, threats, and space. Such assurances must be viewed within the context of settler colonial tropes of Indigenous peoples and spaces as ungovernable (Lawrence and Gibson, 2007). Thus, IPA factsheets are marketing strategies “designed to promote a version of reality to offer reassurance to specific audiences” (Jacobs, 2004: 820). When considering these functions of the texts, we infer such customers are non-Indigenous Australians.

Synthesizing across the results, the reality brought into being is one of alignment across participating Indigenous peoples, the state, and proponents of nature conservation. The IPA program is constructed as a space of harmonization—common ground to manage biodiversity and “care for our country” where everyone wins. Yet at the same time, tactics oriented to shoring up ideas about “us” and “them” (Said, 1978) in the factsheets position the non-Indigenous reader in relation to the Indigenous Other. The effect of these “dividing practices” (Foucault, 1982: 777) is that the program risks being seen by taxpayers as wasteful. As Lawrence and Gibson (2007: 659–660) have suggested, the “view that Aboriginal affairs are a substantial drain on public resources is articulated continually throughout the Australian media and parliamentary debate … These discourses permeate Australian society …[and] rely upon … dichotomies … in which the dependency of Indigenous communities on public resources is constituted as a problem space of government”. The program is formed from this “problem space”—hence alignment with financial imperatives must be asserted.

Thus, factsheets seek to show readers—tax-paying non-Indigenous stakeholders—that this Indigenous program is different and IPA communities are worthy of (minimal) investment. Accordingly, factsheets emphasize public good benefits alongside value for money, financial return on investment, and opportunities for Indigenous financial independence from the state. Together these narratives evince a continual drive to gain support for the program. It is in such ways that the program brings together both economic and social projects of neoliberal governance (Howard-Wagner, 2018). The former involves the roll back of the state and market imperatives. The latter involving government intervention targeting “passive welfare populations” (ibid: 1333).

The contributing and self-determining Indigenous citizen

Through factsheets, Indigenous participants and communities in the IPA program are constituted as self-improving responsible citizens working towards financial independence and self-sufficiency from the state. In so doing, factsheets invert a historical trope that taxpayers are producers/providers of social welfare and Indigenous people are consumers/recipients. In the IPA program, Indigenous peoples become recognized and responsibilized for Country on behalf of the nation, thereby “transforming Indigenous peoples’ status as a problem of alignment with national values and expectations” (Hinkson and Vincent, 2018: 243). Indigenous IPA managers, being knowledgeable and skilled in scientific management of biodiversity, exhibit appropriate conduct and produce public goods. The independence of these Indigenous citizens is not constituted in terms of building Indigenous nationhood but rather in terms of becoming part of the settler colonial economy. Factsheets show that Indigenous subjects are being helped to make positive choices, to take responsibility, and to benefit from conservation market opportunities. Witness being entrepreneurial by becoming an IPA program participant (subject of the government program); tourism and bush food offerings; as well as self-improvement through training.

Such forms of self-improvement are evident in the constitution of the IPA manager, who models what it is to be an employed economic participant “embedded in neoliberal values of individualism, material wealth and self-responsibility” (Di Giorgio and Habibis, 2019: 41). The empowered, responsible, and self-actualized Indigenous subject is also made in alignment with the self-determining subject—where conservation work is presented as part of Indigenous peoples’ historical practices and “desires”. Howard-Wagner (2018: 1346) described this process of recognition in the following terms:

While the intent of paternalistic neo-liberal strategies is to address social inclusion and overcome disadvantage via the economic empowerment of the individual, empowerment of the individual Indigenous citizen occurs at the end point of processes of social inclusion—that is, once the individual Indigenous citizen is an assimilated productive participant in the mainstream economy.

The participating and contributing subject position is made apparent by its opposite—deficit and dependency (Bacchi, 2009: 54–77; Fforde et al., 2013). A deficient non-participative Indigenous subject who is vulnerable, at risk, unemployed, and dependent on welfare is implicit in the factsheets. This subject is othered and excluded from public recognition. These dependent and independent subject positions are co-constitutive and made available via strategies and tactics of neoliberal governance whereby people are variously “supported, abandoned, sacrificed, and enabled” (Lea, 2020: 22).

The Indigenous citizen produced through governmental discourse of the IPA program remains conceived as the custodian of Country but in ways that render unthinkable Indigenous relational ontologies in which Country is a coming “together in an active, sentient, mutually caring and multidirectional manner in, with and as place/space” (Bawaka Country et al., 2016: 456). Imposing a modern separation between universal nature and culture, and thus describing natural heritage, cultural heritage, and Indigenous knowledge as separate entities (Tran and Barcham, 2018), factsheets position Indigenous peoples’ cosmologies as perspectives and interests applied to the nature revealed by science. Subsumed within economic measures of success such as employment, any other “rationale for caring for [C]ountry [is] rendered invisible” (Murdock, 2016: 86). Codified as a quantity of hectares, and then mapped as a surface, Country survives in factsheets as a word only, without its significance for Indigenous participants in the IPA program as the generative ground of existence. While Indigenous realities necessarily exceed and defy representation in modern frameworks, the failure of factsheets to let Indigenous participants speak on their own terms reflects the terms of convergence built into the origins of factsheet discourse.

In the factsheets, dominant political-economic and settler colonial interests work through scientific, economic and institutional arrangements to advance Indigenous self-determination so as to direct and constrain decolonizing possibilities. As Watts (2013: 22) has explained, colonization “is not solely an attack on peoples and lands; rather, this attack is accomplished in part through purposeful and ignorant misrepresentations of Indigenous cosmologies”. Through these re-workings of Indigenous peoples’ ways of knowing, being and doing much then may be lost in the process, including hope for decolonization. Consider how the material-semiotic reality brought into being in factsheets contrasts with the world described by Senior Aṉangu Traditional owners of the Walalkara IPA (an IPA featured in the 2000 and 2001 factsheets). For Aṉangu, the “Dreaming Law and Songlines of the creation ancestors” is known as Tjukurpa (Robin et al., 2022: 44). “Tjukurpa encompasses ancestral stories that crisscross the land, containing knowledge, responsibilities and cultural Law that guides relationships with people, places, plants and animals that occur in nonlinear continuous time and often over large areas” (ibid.). For them, too, “Tjukurpa, and especially the people that hold and carry the Tjukurpa, are the most important aspect of this conservation programme, the Walalkara IPA” (ibid., 50). For Aṉangu then, and across Indigenous peoples of Australia, the land is the source of law (Black, 2011).

Conclusion

Our analysis has been premised on an argument that there is need to address gaps in research of the origins, operations, and effects of Australia's IPA program. Widespread confidence that the IPA program successfully reconciles the aspirations of the settler colonial state, nature conservation actors and Indigenous peoples has emerged in the absence of sufficient critical scrutiny of the politics of this alignment. To help address this lack, we have studied government factsheets about the IPA program between 2001 and 2023 as material-semiotic products and producers of world-making power. Our findings underscore the need to make visible and questionable the power relations that operate in settler colonial programs claiming to empower Indigenous peoples.

The IPA program comes into being across different knowledge producing sites and practices encompassing government, nature conservation and Indigenous actors. This study focuses only on governmental discourse and does not engage with the perspectives, experiences or aspirations of Indigenous peoples directly. Future work will consider other discursive genres (Schofield et al., 2026), and the reception and lived effects of the material semiotic products of the IPA program as Indigenous participants maintain their relationships and responsibilities to/as Country. The insights from this present work may also be beneficial in considering the discursive politics of related programs, such as the government's Indigenous Ranger program.

We have explored factsheets as informational communications because they have the appearance of describing a self-evident reality and truth. Our discourse analysis has, however, revealed how power is expressed in these documents. Factsheets are a singular type of institutional apparatus of government. Through the IPA program, Indigenous peoples now seem empowered to speak about their relationship with Country, but they are heard through factsheets because of the authoritative author function of government that decentres Indigenous voices. The factsheet genre then enables routinized and habituated modes of uneven and unjust interactions between the state and Indigenous peoples.

These documents constitute a series of emplaced and mobile moments in which the government tries to align competing imperatives: a solution to Indigenous disadvantage, calls for Indigenous self-determination, measurable progress for nature conservation, and a resolution to green-Black tensions about conservation. These alignments render the program as natural, inevitable and apolitical. But by working to resolve those tensions, rather than effect a shift in focus to decolonization agendas, the factsheets further embed state discourses about nature, the economy, and work.

Expected subject positions are made available. For Indigenous peoples they include the possibility to be professionalized agents of conservation and responsible citizens working in conjunction with, and for the benefit of the post-colonial state and are contrasted with the trope of the unresponsible, deficient, and dependent Indigenous Other.

Factsheets are not epiphanic, then. Rather than centring the relational ontology of Country and recognizing Country as a powerful subject, they embed “normalised ways of thinking about indigeneity and environments” (van Holstein and Head, 2018: 51). The program operates within the state's recognizable liberal political-economic and settler colonial adherences and points to the ongoing operation of power.

In the final analysis, our original contribution speaks to wider concerns in relation to the persistence of settler colonialism in seemingly progressive conservation projects (Beggs et al., 2025; Coombes et al., 2013) that speak of “rights, recognition, and participation” (Arney et al., 2022: 1182). We have shown that IPAs arrived as part of a broader set of logics and trajectories that may not align with Indigenous peoples’ commitments to Country. The implications of this revelation are that there are potential ongoing consequences of the discourse that bound the decolonizing possibilities of the IPA program. Questions that arise here include what could be done differently and by whom—in future factsheets, for example? As Campion et al. (2024) noted, for “conservation to succeed globally, it is vital to share practical approaches that can help to better recognize and negotiate ontological differences and promote genuinely pluralistic partnerships.”

Highlights

Factsheets are an institutional apparatus and practice that bring the IPA program into being through self-evident facts.

Discursive structures centre dominant scientific cultures of nature, dominant political economies, and governmental power and policy.

Analysing available subject positions reveals the hidden politics of the program and a set of broader logics and trajectories.

Discursive structures and practices may limit possibilities to conserve Country and honour Indigenous peoples in ways that truly advance decolonization.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Muwinina Country where we live and work and acknowledge that Muwinina people did not survive invasion. We honour today's Tasmanian Aboriginal communities as the original and continuing owners of Lutruwita/Tasmania.

Data availability statement

Links to factsheets are provided as endnotes in the manuscript.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Ethical considerations

Ethical approval was not required for this research.

Funding

This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP180103118).

ORCID iDs

Lydia Schofield

Aidan Davison

Elaine Stratford

Notes

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Decolonizing conservation? Australian government discourses on the Indigenous Protected Areas program 2000–2023

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Intersections of settler colonialism and nature conservation – ideas and concepts

The origins of the IPA program

Methodology

Methods

Results

Theme 1: Cultures of conservation science

Theme 2: Political economies of conservation

Theme 3: Governing Country

Discussion

The enabling and financially responsible post-colonial state

The tax-paying non-Indigenous stakeholder

The contributing and self-determining Indigenous citizen

Conclusion

Highlights

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Data availability statement

Declaration of conflicting interest

Ethical considerations

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References