CARE Principles

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance were developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), announced in September 2019 and formally set out in peer-reviewed form the following year: Carroll, S.R., Garba, I., Figueroa-Rodríguez, O.L. et al., “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance,” Data Science Journal, 19(1):43 (2020). The acronym stands for Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, and Ethics.

The four principles

• Collective Benefit — data ecosystems should be designed to enable Indigenous Peoples to derive benefit from the data, consistent with their own self-determined priorities, not only benefit for external researchers or institutions.
• Authority to Control — Indigenous Peoples’ rights and interests in their own data must be recognised, and their authority to control that data respected, from collection through governance and future use.
• Responsibility — those working with Indigenous data have a responsibility to share how data is used to support Indigenous Peoples’ self-determination and collective benefit, and to build capacity within Indigenous communities and data institutions.
• Ethics — Indigenous Peoples’ rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern at all stages of the data lifecycle, from the potential for collective harm through to the ethics of future use.

Why CARE complements FAIR rather than replacing it

GIDA is explicit that CARE is designed as a complement to the data-oriented perspective of standards such as the FAIR Principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), not a substitute for them. FAIR addresses the technical and infrastructural properties that make data usable — whether it can be found, accessed, integrated, and reused — and says nothing about who has authority over the data or what obligations follow from collecting it. CARE is people- and purpose-oriented: it addresses the rights Indigenous Peoples hold over data about themselves, their knowledge, their lands, and their communities, and the obligations that follow from those rights. A dataset can be fully FAIR-compliant and still fail CARE if it was made openly accessible without Indigenous community authority over that decision — technical openness and rightful governance are different properties, and a data management plan needs to address both. See CARE Principles vs. FAIR Principles for the full principle-by-principle comparison.

How CARE is operationalised in practice

Research offices and repositories most often encounter CARE through data management plan language (describing how Indigenous community authority is recognised in access decisions), repository governance policies that layer community-controlled access conditions on top of FAIR-compliant infrastructure, and funder guidance asking applicants to describe CARE engagement wherever a project may generate or use Indigenous data. CARE is frequently applied alongside other Indigenous-led or Indigenous-specific frameworks with narrower scope — Canada’s OCAP Principles (Ownership, Control, Access, Possession; First Nations Information Governance Centre), the Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) standard that governs the underlying research relationship, and protections for Traditional Knowledge (TK) such as Local Contexts’ TK and Biocultural Labels. CARE does not replace any of these; it is the data-governance layer that sits alongside them.

CARE’s own author organisation, GIDA, is itself a global alliance whose national and regional member networks articulate their own locally grounded principles: Te Mana Raraunga, the Maori Data Sovereignty Network in Aotearoa New Zealand, and Maiam nayri Wingara, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective in Australia. A researcher or institution working with a specific Indigenous community’s data should engage with that community’s own, locally grounded principles and relevant national network first, using CARE as the shared cross-jurisdictional baseline rather than a substitute for local engagement.

References

• Carroll, S.R. et al., “The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance,” Data Science Journal, 19(1):43 (2020).
• Global Indigenous Data Alliance, gida-global.org.

These principles are frequently applied to traditional ecological knowledge held by Indigenous communities.