"Co-design" has become one of those words that gets used to describe whatever engagement a project happened to do. It is worth being strict about, because the difference between co-design and consultation is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of power.
Consultation asks people to react to a plan you have already made. You frame the problem, you draft the options, and you invite feedback, which you may or may not take. Co-design shares the pen from the beginning: the people affected help frame the problem, shape the options, and make the decisions. The test is brutally simple. Could what you heard have changed the design in a fundamental way? If the answer is no, it was not co-design, whatever the agenda called it.
If the design could not have changed based on what you heard, it was not co-design; it was theatre.
This matters everywhere, but it matters most in work with communities who have been "consulted" many times and seen little change, because tokenistic engagement does not just fail to help; it actively erodes trust, faster than no engagement at all. People can tell the difference between being asked and being used to ratify a decision already made, and they remember.
In Indigenous and community contexts, co-design is not only the ethical choice; it is the epistemically necessary one. The people closest to a problem hold knowledge the designers simply do not have, and a process that keeps the pen in the consultant's hand will produce a tidier plan and a worse one. Sharing the pen is harder, slower, and messier. It is also the only way to design something that fits the lives it is meant to serve.