Crossing cultural boundaries: Integrating Indigenous water knowledge into water governance through co-research in the Queensland Wet Tropics, Australia

Governments grapple with ways to integrate diverse values and interests to inform water management to satisfy utilitarian needs and to maintain healthy ecological and cultural landscapes. Engagement with Indigenous people has had limited success. In Australia, this is due to culturally inappropriate government-led engagement approaches, a lack of political will to prioritise Indigenous involvement in water planning, and a lack of culturally appropriate documentation of Indigenous water values, knowledge and interests. Planning processes tend to assume Indigenous water interests are 'just cultural' and thereby limit Indigenous perspectives and knowledge contributions. This paper shows how a co-operative research project enabled an Indigenous group from the Queensland Wet Tropics to better engage in water governance on their traditional country. It illustrates how the development of a boundary object (a research report) can act to translate Indigenous knowledge, values and management interests so as to maintain its cultural integrity and enable it to be more easily interpreted by non-Indigenous planners and scientists.