Innovation As Necessity: Te Rarawa and the Challenges of Multi-Purpose Research

Abstract

Te Rūnanga o Te Rarawa, like other iwi organisations, strives for seamlessness and holism in its operations. Yet, much of its work is characterised by compartmentalisation of, for example, funding, service provision, service contracts, government agencies and policymaking. In 2006, compartmentalisation of research presented itself as a problem to the Rūnanga when four projects appeared on its workload, simultaneously separate and joined. What separated the projects was that each was funded from a different source, and therefore carried different contractual obligations and reporting requirements, let alone different sets of iwi expectations. What joined the projects were the broad goals of whānau and hapū development, preparation for a post-settlement iwi environment, and research: one project was entirely a research project, and the others either included a defined research component or stood to benefit from being informed by research. The challenge for Te Rarawa was, in effect, to reclaim the research, to repackage its goals for iwi purposes, and to reinstate the principles of seamlessness and holism to its design, and to do that while also meeting the disparate contractual obligations derived from either an academic or governmental ‘compartment’. The result was Ngā Tähuhu o te Taiao, both a conceptual umbrella under which the projects could gather, drawn together by ideological lines of ancestry and tikanga implicit in the t_huhu, and a comprehensive, structured framework that wed the research to the Rūnanga’s processes and programmes of work.