Stephen Cornell's opinion piece, first published in The Australian

CLOSING the gap has become a common theme in discussions of policy towards the indigenous people of Australia. Newcomers are appalled at the enormous differences between mainstream and indigenous life expectancies, employment rates and housing conditions.

Such disparities in one of the richest countries in the world produce consternation, hand-wringing and plenty of blaming. It's the fault of indigenous people say some; why can't they get their act together? It's the fault of government, say others; why can't they deal with the situation effectively? Still others give up and simply turn away.

Australia is not alone in facing such gaps. Earlier in this decade, New Zealand government policy towards Maori operated under a "closing the gap" banner. There's frequent debate in the media in Canada about why Canadian aborigines continue to languish in poverty. My own country - the US - has an indigenous population that ranks at or near the bottom of the scale in household income, employment, health, and housing, far behind the mainstream.

The reasons for such gaps are not hard to find. You seize a people's economic resources, drive them off their lands, impose external administrative controls over numerous aspects of their lives, ignore their ideas of how communities should work, suppress their cultures, and treat them like children. In other words, if you show little respect for people, land, and culture, you should not be surprised by a harvest of anger and despair.

But discussions of the origins of these problems, while important, can distract us from the more urgent issue of what to do now. Here, the US experience may be helpful. Over the past 20 years, the gap between the US mainstream and its indigenous population has begun to close.

There is a very long way to go and many Native American communities are still trapped in poverty. But taken as a whole, the indigenous population located on native lands (called reservations) is starting a remarkable socioeconomic comeback.

Between 1990 and 2000, per capita incomes among reservation-based Native Americans rose by more than 30 per cent, as opposed to per capita income growth in the US population as a whole of just over 10 per cent. Growth in real median household income was between 35 and 40 per cent, as against growth for the US of 4 per cent. The percentage of reservation-based Native American children in poverty fell from approximately 50 per cent in 1990 to 40 per cent in 2000, while in the population as a whole, it fell from 18 per cent to 17 per cent. The same period saw striking rises in employment on Indian lands, including self-employment, and increases in the number of productive enterprises - many of them tribally owned - on native lands.

These changes continued a pattern that was already emerging in a more modest form in the '80s. While we lack comparable data for this decade - the next census won't take place until 2010 - the trend appears to be continuing.

These rates of change start from an extremely low baseline. If they were to continue, it would still be decades before the reservation-based indigenous population reached parity with the mainstream. But progress is being made.

How did this happen? Did federal programs do the job? Was it investments in education, or job creation, or health care? Was it the impact of the gambling industry (since the late '80s there has been rapid growth in tribally owned casinos on some native lands)? Was it a change in government policy? Did Native American nations themselves make it happen?

Several of these factors have played a part, but two things appear to have been particularly important. The first is a major change in government policy towards indigenous populations, coupled with a change in the role the government has played in indigenous communities. The second is a set of actions and investments - not so much of money but of time, energy and ideas - by indigenous communities themselves.

The shift in government policy came in the latter part of the '70s under the rubric of self-determination. Its details matter less than its overall thrust, which was to move decision-making power out of the hands of government agencies and into the hands of indigenous communities.

It is difficult to say how much of this shift was intentional on the part of those agencies. Their notion of self-determination was a modest one, much closer to self-management or self-administration than self-government. It was limited to the idea that indigenous communities would take over the administration of social service programs conceived and developed, and previously run, by federal bureaucrats.

Native American nations chose to view self-determination very differently, interpreting it not as self-management but as exercising significant decision-making power over the design of community organisations and governance systems, economic policies, the management of their lands, education of their children, and a host of other functions. They saw it as referring to governing - translating the will of the community into sustained and organised action - and not simply to administering social service programs. For them, self-determination promised the restoration of an old indigenous activity in new forms: making major decisions for themselves. They moved aggressively to enact that understanding.

But - and here the second factor comes into play - many of those nations realised that if their idea of self-determination was going to yield results, they would have to govern well. Beginning on a large scale in the '80s, a growing number of Native American nations have invested significant time and energy in developing capable governing institutions. In some cases they have drawn on their own cultural traditions in the design of those institutions; in others, they have borrowed from each other and from the US mainstream to create new institutions that can get the governance job done. The result is diverse, indigenously generated and therefore more effective systems of governance.

These developments argue for a new kind of collaboration. On one side, government has to be flexible and committed enough to support the efforts of indigenous communities to develop governance systems - necessarily diverse - that reflect community understandings of how to govern, have real teeth, and are capable of addressing serious governance challenges. On the other, indigenous communities have to think carefully about how to organise to protect the things they wish to protect while changing the things they wish to change. In the US, where such collaborations are found, we have seen significant improvements in indigenous socioeconomic conditions.

Of course there are substantial differences between indigenous situations in Australia and the US. But the lesson for us has been that closing the gap, while enormously difficult, can be done where indigenous communities become central players in the process, supported by government but making major decisions for themselves.

Stephen Cornell, co-director of the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, will speak in Canberra today at a talk sponsored by Reconciliation Australia.