Outback landscape

First Nations rights

As demand for critical minerals grows, ensuring that development respects and advances First Nations rights is more important than ever. ANU combines expertise across law, policy, governance, economics and environmental science to support evidence-based approaches that place Indigenous rights, participation and benefit-sharing at the centre of critical minerals decision-making.

Projects & initiatives

ANU First Nations Portfolio

ANU First Nations hub brings together the university's commitments to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples across research, education, and institutional life. It connects students and staff to a range of initiatives — including those that take up issues of land, resources, and justice.

Centre for Indigenous Policy Research (CIPR)

CIPR conducts nationally and internationally significant research in partnership with First Nations communities across three interconnected areas: Indigenous governance and nation-building, culture and wellbeing, and policy making. The centre is known for co-producing research frameworks that amplify First Nations voices that include economic empowerment and natural resource use on First Nations lands and communities. 

Indigenous Natural Resource Management and Livelihoods

This research program, led by Professor Jon Altman, examines how Indigenous communities manage land, resources, and livelihoods in the face of neoliberal pressures. Focused on ranger groups and communities across Kakadu and North East Arnhem Land, it contributes to an international comparative project on Indigenous conservation and development alternatives, centred on sustaining Indigenous economies and food security on country. 

Extractive Systems Lab (XS)

Founded by Professor Nick Bainton, the Extractive Systems Laboratory (XS Lab) examines the planetary pressures of resource extraction in an overheated world. Treating extraction as a socio-technical and political system shaped by colonial histories, the XS Lab pursues co-designed, interdisciplinary research that both diagnoses the problems of extraction and advances pathways for change. Current work spans Free, Prior and Informed Consent in global mining, Indigenous data sovereignty, First Nations rights in the critical minerals scramble, seabed mining risks, and communities facing the double burden of climate change and extractive capitalism.