The Hybrid Economy Topic Guide by Susie Russell. A resource exploring the hybrid economy model of economic practice, it provides an introductory guide to relevant literature, and surveys issues including cultural and natural resource management, overlapping economic sectors, art, the Community Development Employment Program (CDEP), ‘real economy’ critiques, hybrid institutions and interculturality, and critical engagements with the hybrid model. [Available for download below]

Over the past ten years, Jon Altman has theorised a model of economic practice known as the hybrid economy, and has developed its implications in his own writings and in collaboration with others. The hybrid economy model is one means of recognising the existence of and interdependencies between diverse and distinctive kinds of economic activity undertaken by Indigenous people in remote and regional Australia. To the conventional two sector conceptualisation of the economy (market/private and state/public), Altman adds a third: what he terms the ‘customary’ sector. The customary sector is constituted by non-monetised activities, such as fishing, hunting and gathering, that emerge from and reaffirm dynamic Indigenous connections to country and ways of being. The customary economy is especially salient where the settler-colonial state arrived on Aboriginal lands relatively recently. For Altman, the customary economy is central to sustainable livelihoods on the Indigenous estate.