Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Deirdre Howard-Wagner is a sociologist, socio-legal scholar, POLIS@ANU Social Policy, Participation and Inclusion Program Lead and former Director of Research and Associate Professor at the Centre for Indigenous Policy Research at The Australian National University. Her research focuses on historical and contemporary racial projects in Indigenous policy contexts, Closing the Gap policy, Indigenous care, Indigenous justice, urban Indigenous development, and self-determination.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7884-2756
A Quiet Revolution in Indigenous Service Delivery »
New Public Management and its Effects on First Nations Organisations
Edited by: Deirdre Howard-Wagner
Publication date: 2025
The government Indigenous service market that is now well entrenched in the public administration system has operated to marginalise First Nations people and First Nations organisations, who have had very little say, if any, over the last 20 years, about how government services are designed to meet their needs.
The chapters in this volume comprehensively describe and illustrate how the government Indigenous market, and the Indigenous service delivery system created around that market, have failed and why system change is needed, drawing on the firsthand experiences of community-controlled First Nations organisations through organisational case studies in urban settings in New South Wales (NSW).
This volume offers the expertise of individual community-controlled First Nations organisations operating in urban settings in NSW, which variously operate as social enterprises, businesses, community development organisations, social service providers, representatives, and advocacy organisations.
Concentrating on the experiences of individual First Nations organisations allows us to examine the complex, layered Indigenous service system as a multi-jurisdictional phenomenon on the ground in an urban context.
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The Neoliberal State, Recognition and Indigenous Rights »
New paternalism to new imaginings
Edited by: Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Maria Bargh, Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez
Publication date: July 2018
The impact of neoliberal governance on indigenous peoples in liberal settler states may be both enabling and constraining. This book is distinctive in drawing comparisons between three such states—Australia, Canada and New Zealand. In a series of empirically grounded, interpretive micro-studies, it draws out a shared policy coherence, but also exposes idiosyncrasies in the operational dynamics of neoliberal governance both within each state and between them. Read together as a collection, these studies broaden the debate about and the analysis of contemporary government policy.
The individual studies reveal the forms of actually existing neoliberalism that are variegated by historical, geographical and legal contexts and complex state arrangements. At the same time, they present examples of a more nuanced agential, bottom-up indigenous governmentality. Focusing on intense and complex matters of social policy rather than on resource development and land rights, they demonstrate how indigenous actors engage in trying to govern various fields of activity by acting on the conduct and contexts of everyday neoliberal life, and also on the conduct of state and corporate actors.