Aboriginal contributions to the evaluation of housing (and to postcolonial theory)

Housing Reference Groups (HRGs) began to be established in remote Northern Territory (NT) Aboriginal communities in 2009 when the Northern Territory Government compulsorily acquired remote Aboriginal housing and closed down 75 Aboriginal Housing associations. In this highly contested context, we were invited to undertake an evaluation of the HRGs. Through both open discussion and semi-structured interviews, we learnt from the Aboriginal people we worked with to see a much wider, more structural understanding of housing and its governance. This in turn led us to reflect upon Aboriginal contributions to the theory and practice of evaluation, and their various relations to received theories such as social justice, pragmatist philosophy and ethics, and Frierian conscientization. This collaborative ground-up evaluation process contributed to our own ongoing practices of evaluation, and possibly to some slight but reverberating changes in government policy and practice.