The global conversation about Indigenous data governance has, in recent years, found a powerful shared language in the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance — Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility and Ethics. CARE provides an internationally recognised frame, articulated by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), that positions Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests at the centre of how data about them is governed. But principles at the global level are realised in particular places, by particular peoples, grounded in particular relationships and legal traditions. One of the most developed expressions of Indigenous data sovereignty anywhere is Te Mana Raraunga, the Māori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa New Zealand, whose work shows how a regional model can give CARE concrete meaning while standing on foundations all its own. This article examines that model, drawing on the Indigenous data and CARE domain of the CASRAI Dictionary.
What Te Mana Raraunga is
Te Mana Raraunga is a network advocating for Māori rights and interests in data — for Māori data sovereignty. The phrase te mana raraunga itself speaks to the authority and integrity that attach to data, and the network exists to assert that Māori, as the people to whom much of that data relates, have legitimate rights of governance over it. Its concerns span how Māori data is collected, who controls it, how it is used, and whether its use serves Māori aspirations or merely extracts from Māori communities. The network has been instrumental in defining what Māori data sovereignty means in practice and in pressing institutions to recognise and respect it. It represents not an abstract ideal but an organised, articulate movement with a developed body of principles.
Grounded in Te Tiriti o Waitangi
What distinguishes the Māori model, and makes it more than a local application of a global frame, is its foundation in Te Tiriti o Waitangi — the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding constitutional document of Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Tiriti establishes a relationship between Māori and the Crown and affirms Māori authority over their own affairs and treasured things. Māori data sovereignty draws directly on this: if Māori hold authority over their taonga (treasures) and their own domains, then data about Māori — their people, lands, language and knowledge — falls within the scope of that authority. This gives Māori data sovereignty a distinctive constitutional grounding that an appeal to general principle does not: the argument is not only ethical but rests on a recognised relationship and a foundational agreement, which lends the model particular force.
How the regional model complements CARE
The relationship between Te Mana Raraunga and the global CARE frame is complementary, not competitive, and understanding how illuminates Indigenous data governance more broadly.
- CARE provides the shared language. Collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility and ethics give a vocabulary recognisable across borders and useful for engaging international infrastructures and institutions.
- The regional model provides the grounding. Te Tiriti gives Māori data sovereignty a specific constitutional foundation and a specific people whose authority is being asserted, turning general principle into concrete, situated claim.
- Each strengthens the other. The global frame lends regional movements international recognition and solidarity; regional models like the Māori one give the global principles tested, real-world expression and demonstrate that they can be operationalised.
This is why Indigenous data sovereignty is best understood as a family of grounded movements connected by shared principles, rather than a single uniform doctrine.
Distinct from other Indigenous data frameworks
It is important not to flatten the diversity of Indigenous data governance into one model. The Māori approach is distinct, for example, from Canada’s widely cited OCAP principles — Ownership, Control, Access and Possession — developed by and for First Nations in a different constitutional and historical context. OCAP and Māori data sovereignty share a commitment to Indigenous authority over Indigenous data, but they arise from different peoples, different legal foundations and different histories, and they are expressed differently. Recognising this matters: Indigenous peoples are not interchangeable, and good practice does not lift a framework from one context and impose it on another. The right model is the one grounded in the rights, relationships and aspirations of the specific people concerned. The global CARE frame accommodates this diversity precisely because it sets principles rather than prescribing a single mechanism.
CARE alongside FAIR
Indigenous data sovereignty also reshapes how the familiar FAIR principles — Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable — are understood. FAIR is concerned with the technical qualities that make data useful and reusable, but it is largely silent on questions of power, consent and benefit. CARE, and grounded models like Te Mana Raraunga, supply exactly what FAIR leaves out: who decides, who benefits, and on whose authority data is used. The two are meant to operate together — data can be FAIR and CARE at once — but where they pull in different directions, the Māori model is clear that authority and collective benefit are not negotiable conveniences. Making data maximally open is not a virtue if it overrides the rights of the people the data concerns.
A consistent vocabulary for grounded governance
For Indigenous data governance to be respected across the systems that hold and share research data, the terms involved — consent conditions, governance authority, access and benefit arrangements, provenance — must be described in ways that carry their meaning faithfully wherever the data travels. That consistency is part of what the CASRAI Dictionary works towards: a shared vocabulary so that a governance condition asserted by a community is not quietly lost when its data moves between systems. And because stewarding Indigenous data and partnering with the communities it concerns is genuine, recognisable work, it can be described in the same shared framework as any other contribution — the CRediT taxonomy and the wider apparatus of research administration. Te Mana Raraunga shows what Indigenous data sovereignty looks like when it is grounded in a people’s own authority; the global principles show how such grounded models can speak to one another and to the world.
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