Wild Policy: Indigeneity and the Unruly Logics of Intervention

Anthropology of Policy

by Tess Lea

Can there be good social policy? This book describes what happens to Indigenous policy when it targets the supposedly 'wild people' of regional and remote Australia. Tess Lea explores naturalized policy unplugged, gone live, ramifying in everyday life, to show that it is policies that are wild, not the people being targeted. Lea turns the notion of unruliness on its head to reveal a policy-driven world dominated by short term political interests and their erratic, irrational effects, and by the less obvious protection of long-term interests in resource extraction and the liberal settler lifestyles this sustains. Wild Policy argues policies are not about undoing the big causes of enduring inequality, and do not ameliorate harms terribly well either--without yielding all hope. Drawing on efforts across housing and infrastructure, resistant media-making, health, governance and land tenure battles in regional and remote Australia, Wild Policy looks at how the logics of intervention are formulated and what this reveals in answer to the why is it all so hard? Lea offers readers a layered, multi-relational approach called policy ecology to probe the related question, 'what is to be done?' Lea's case material will resonate with analysts across the world who deal with infrastructures, policy, technologies, mining, militarization, enduring colonial legacies, and the Anthropocene.

Genres: Anthropology

Paperback

Published July 1, 2020

Reviews

[Courtney Kruzan · Rating 4 out of 5]

By no means is this a fun read, but it is packed with some good theory and paradigms. I would not recommend this as a casual read, but if you study or are into policy then I definitely would recommend it to you.

I particularly loved the concept of Policy Hauntology that Tess Lea introduces and used throughout; policies are not isolated events within their own time, they operate spectrally continuously shaping the present, past, and future. Policy travels through space and time, it haunts.

Lea uses Australia's SIHIP and other contemporary interventionist policies from her fieldwork to illustrate this.

[Ian Buchanan · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is no more important book on policy than Lea's Wild Policy. She completely demolishes the myth that policy is something that can be fine-tuned and eventually gotten 'right'. She shows that policy is a kind of necessary fiction (to use Clifford's term) that government's rely on to conduct the business of government, which often amounts to nothing more than wanting to appear to be doing something when in reality they aren't interested in doing anything. It should be in the must read category for anyone interested in policy, particularly if they're interested in how policy works in contemporary Australia.