Across the world’s rangelands, livelihoods of millions of people are dependent on customary and commercial use of wildlife. Many Australian Aboriginal communities also aspire towards developing natural resource-based enterprises but there is a unique combination of historical, legislative and cultural factors that make this process complex. Typically, government support for Indigenous enterprise development has focussed largely on development of ‘social enterprise’, with subsidies coming from various government community development programs. This has resulted in some increase in participation and employment, but often inadequate attention to economic aspects of enterprise development leading to low levels of business success. This paper will examine historical, legislative and institutional dimensions in business development in Aboriginal communities. It does this through a case study of business enterprise development of the Kakadu Plum products by the Indigenous people of the Thamarrurr Region of the Northern Territory, Australia, using a participant observation research method. We found that attention on important economic criteria was subsumed by a focus on social enterprise priorities during the development of this natural resource-based enterprise. This resulted in a very slow transition of the ‘social enterprise’ to the ‘financial enterprise’, due largely to fragmented business decisions and inefficient value chains. We call for a refocus of natural resource-based enterprise development programs in remote Australian Aboriginal townships to incorporate greater emphasis on business acumen within the complex social, cultural and political fabric.

在全世界的牧场上，数百万人的生计依赖​​于野生生物的习惯和商业利用。许多澳大利亚土著社区也渴望发展以自然资源为基础的企业，但历史，立法和文化因素的独特结合使这一过程变得复杂。通常，政府对土著企业发展的支持主要集中在“社会企业”的发展上，补贴来自各种政府社区发展计划。这导致参与和就业有所增加，但通常对企业发展的经济方面的重视不足，导致企业成功水平较低。本文将探讨历史，土著社区业务发展的立法和机构层面。它通过参与研究方法，通过澳大利亚北领地Thamarrurr地区的原住民对Kakadu Plum产品的商业企业开发进行了案例研究。我们发现，在这种自然资源型企业的发展过程中，对重要经济标准的关注被社会企业的优先重点所吸引。这导致“社会企业”向“金融企业”的过渡非常缓慢，这在很大程度上是由于业务决策分散和价值链效率低下。