Housing for Health in Indigenous Australia: driving change when research and policy are part of the problem.
Authors:
The failures of social policy in Indigenous Australia are legion, to the current point where the former national government declared a national state of emergency in its own borders. In calmer times, recommendations for solutions almost inevitably include a call for more practice-oriented research to increase the evidence base informing social interventions. Just as inevitably, researchers bemoan the difficulties of influencing policy and the culpabilities involved; while policy practitioners have equally standardised frustrations concerning the irrelevance of much research. Many understand this familiar division, almost affectionately, as a function of the different organizational cultures separating the academy from the bureaucracy. This paper complicates this longstanding binary by drawing on an example of an evidence-based program to improve housing functionality in Indigenous Australia, known as Housing for Health. Stereotypical claims about the cultural differences separating policy and research are replaced with lessons about the specific characteristics of those who would wield effective strategic-administrative interventions and are able to enjoin evidence to action