Cultural counterfactuals: Assessing the impact of indigenous social procurement in Australia

In countries like Australia, Canada and South Africa with large Indigenous populations, governments are increasingly turning to social procurement to solve entrenched social problems like Indigenous disadvantage, leveraging construction and infrastructure spending to encourage new partnerships with construction business, not-for-profits and social benefit organisations like Indigenous enterprises which deliver construction products and services. However, the success of such policies has so far been judged from a western perspective and primarily from the monetary perspective of investors, ironically ignoring Indigenous notions of value: the intended beneficiaries whose lives social procurement is aimed at improving. This paper explores the proposition that current methods of social impact assessment fail to adequately articulate the social impact of Indigenous procurement policies, presenting an overly optimistic and westernised view of success which does not align with Indigenous perspectives of social value. For example, while providing employment may look successful to a Government, the potential negative social value of an Indigenous person needing to move away from their country and community to secure work are rarely taken into account in social impact assessments of policy success. Building on our previous work, this theoretical paper draws on strain theory to introduce the concept of 'cultural counterfactuals' into the social impact debate for the first time. We argue that the project-based nature of construction appears to conflict with Indigenous notions of social value and that social procurement in this context may do more harm than good if not managed effectively. At the very least, these cultural counterfactuals should be taken into account in any social impact measurement exercise.