Collaborative and Participative Research: Accountability and the Indigenous Voice

This paper discusses a collaborative and participative approach to studying the effect of government funding regimes on remote Indigenous communities in Northern Australia. The study brings forth the Indigenous voice to demonstrate the disparity between Western and Indigenous ways of understanding and communicating accounting and accountability. The knowledge-sharing process revealed that the essence of accountability was found to be embedded within the participants' own Traditional culture and the paper argues that, if there is to be a shared accountability between Indigenous communities and government, there needs to be a very different approach to the way in which concepts of accounting and accountability are utilised by government.