Valuing seafood enterprises differently – Saltwater Peoples’ perspectives from the Maningrida region, Northern Territory, Australia

There is a growing body of literature exploring value of seafood enterprises beyond economic considerations. Aboriginal Saltwater peoples from the Northern Territory, Australia, have always engaged in various forms of seafood enterprise. Despite a growing policy and support agenda for Indigenous fisheries and aquaculture, there are few enduring Indigenous fishing enterprises. There are also limited evaluations of these enterprises, or the Indigenous perspectives of value which underpin them. We address these gaps through a community-based qualitative case study of local and external perspectives of value or perceived worth of seafood enterprises from the Maningrida region in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. We explore how value is expressed generally and through the governance and operational business models features of nine enterprises. Contextual barriers preventing the value from being expressed are also considered. Aboriginal people highly valued the enterprises because they provided an opportunity to spend time on Country, generate income, and provide food from locally owned resources. This delivered a range of health, wellbeing, social, cultural and self-determination benefits. These benefits flowed across societal scales, including to individuals, kinships groups and the wider community. These values contrast with non-Indigenous people and organisations who largely considered value from an economic perspective. The key business model features considered important by Saltwater people were associated with shared decision-making, place, enterprise scale and technology choices. The findings of this research can support a broader policy discourse to move to locally led enterprise business models and development initiatives which better accommodate Saltwater peoples’ conceptualisations of value.