Building a Model for Māori Data Governance in New Zealand Universities

Universities in Aotearoa hold a vast but unknown amount of Māori data which has been collected since their establishment. In the past two decades especially, policies such as Vision Mātauranga have increased the volume of Māori led and Māori focused research being conducted within Aotearoa universities. This is likely to have contributed to an increase in the size scope and diversity of Māori data held by these institutions. The full extent and nature of this data remain unclear, as do the practices of universities in safeguarding the mana and mauri of data as taonga. What is clear is that universities hold significant power over the collection, storage, access, and use of Māori data; power that is not equally shared with the communities that the data comes from.

Māori Data Sovereignty (MDSov) challenges these power imbalances and centre the needs and aspirations of Māori communities in controlling, accessing and managing Māori data. Despite foregrounding Māori rights and responsibilities in MDSov and MDGov, there remain knowledge and implementation gaps which act as barriers for Māori to realise MDSov.

The recently funded research program ‘Activating Māori Research Data Sovereignty in universities’, responds to these challenges of findability, governance and accessibility. The program has been designed to explore the ways in which we can understand and implement Māori led data governance and sovereignty within institutions that claim a commitment to te Tiriti (the Treaty) and MDSov.

In this presentation I will speak to the second objective of the program, related to Māori data governance. I will outline how the project plans to develop and implement Māori governance policies over Māori research data and build upon existing maturity models to hold universities accountable in their role as data stewards and assert the inherent rights of Māori as kaitiaki (guardians/stewards) of Māori data.