Beyond Compliance: Black Cladding, Indigenous Procurement, and the Realising of Economic Sovereignty

This paper examines Black cladding, the fraudulent or superficial representation of Indigenous ownership and control used to access economic opportunities intended for genuine Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses. Through a Relational Indigenist Framework that integrates Bryant’s (2024) Indigenist Critical Policy Analysis with Aboriginal Terms of Reference, the paper analyses how procurement systems such as Australia’s Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) reproduce settler-colonial logics of control by privileging compliance and efficiency over Indigenous governance, cultural legitimacy, and self-determination. The analysis reveals that Black cladding is not an accumulation of individual acts of fraud but a structural outcome of policy designs that translate Indigeneity into administrative categories rather than a lived identity grounded in relation to community and Country. It explores how these structures enable economic and cultural harm, including the erosion of Indigenous business models grounded in relationality, reciprocity, kinship, and custodianship. Drawing on international comparisons and Indigenous policy scholarship, the paper demonstrates that embedding Indigenous authority, oversight, and definitional control within procurement policy strengthens legitimacy, integrity, and outcomes for all stakeholders. It concludes that procurement reform must move beyond symbolic inclusion toward Indigenous-led systems of governance aligned with Aboriginal Terms of Reference and the principles of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), repositioning procurement as a mechanism of economic sovereignty and structural justice.