Cultural Competency Is Key to Enhanced Collaborative Management of Culturally Significant Entities

ABSTRACT Collaborative management underpinned by shared decision‐making is increasingly accepted as an effective tool to halt the decline in biodiversity and support species and ecosystem recovery. Indigenous people are lobbying to mandate collaborative management of Culturally Significant Entities (CSEs): species and ecological communities to which Indigenous peoples attribute cultural value, and which are critical to their relationship with and adaptation to country. However, the challenge persists in reaching a balance between the application of Western Science and Indigenous Knowledge to achieve genuine collaborative management using shared decision‐making. As a group of Indigenous Australian researchers, with insights from our collective professional experience, we explore some management scenarios for CSEs. We highlight how environmental managers and researchers find themselves injecting their unconscious biases in decision‐making, favouring Western Science over Indigenous Knowledge. There are many lessons to improve collaborative management, and we explore three primary connected themes. (1) Rightsholders not stakeholders, (2) Who speaks for country and (3) Valuing Indigenous Knowledge. We find that there is no escaping the reality that building meaningful and respectful relationships with Indigenous people requires investment and that there needs to be a significant shift in the cultural competency of the environmental sector to achieve equity in collaborative management.