Abstract

The history of Indigenous community development in Australia has been disappointing for all stakeholders, none more than the community members. One of the important contributions to this state of affairs has been the over estimation of community capacity by consultants, bureaucrats and community leaders. This leads to inappropriate interventions that are unsuccessful not because they are flawed, but because they assume entry levels that are incorrect. In the absence of adequate research regarding the Critical Success Factors for Indigenous communities in Australia, the Harvard Indian Project provides some useful indicators of areas of concern. When the indicators from the Harvard Indian project are combined with the developmental framework for organisations proposed by Bill Torbert, the combination provides a useful framework for assessment of the current capacity of the community. This allows better targeting of capacity development interventions for the community, which ultimately will improve the sustainability of the community. A trial application of the framework in nine Indigenous communities is reported in this paper.