Moving forward from the Community Development Programme: Informing policy change through collaborative research

The Community Development Programme (CDP) is a remote-area Work for the Dole scheme that principally affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The programme has been billed by the government as 'helping people find work, and allowing them to contribute to their communities and gain skills while looking for work.' But there is mounting evidence from a number of complementary research projects that CDP has created significant hardship for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, leading to increasing pressure for the scheme to be scrapped or radically overhauled.

These research projects are based on collaborations with a broad cross-section of interested parties including academic researchers, Aboriginal organisations, remote Aboriginal communities, and non-government program providers. They draw on a mix of social scientific and ethnographic methods to examine the design, implementation and impacts of CDP and inform proposals for a more productive way ahead.