Indigenous Peoples and Indicators of Well-being: Australian Perspectives on United Nations Global Frameworks

One of the major tasks of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII) following its establishment in 2000 has been to establish statistical profiles of the world’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this broad task, it has recommended that the Millennium Development Goals and other global reporting frameworks should be assessed with a view to incorporating greater recognition of Indigenous concerns, interests, and interpretations of development and well-being. This article reviews the conceptual basis for this recommendation and compares the activities of the UNPFII towards the development of appropriate indicators with the practices of the Australian government in measuring disadvantage among Indigenous peoples in that country. Indigenous peoples’ own perceptions and understandings of well-being are seen to extend beyond and sometimes conflict with conventional reporting frameworks with the latter constructed more around processes of governmentality than Indigenous priorities.