Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A First Nations governance body establishes its own data stewardship rules for research data collected within its territory.
- Is an instance
A research data agreement defers to community-led Indigenous Data Governance structures for access decisions.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A research team unilaterally drafting a data sharing policy without engagement with relevant Indigenous communities does not constitute Indigenous Data Governance.
- Not an instance
Generic institutional governance applied without recognition of Indigenous authority is not Indigenous Data Governance.
Editorial commentary
Indigenous Data Governance is the operational expression of Indigenous Data Sovereignty: the structures, mechanisms, and agreements through which Indigenous Peoples exercise authority over the collection, access, use, and stewardship of data about themselves. Where Indigenous Data Sovereignty names the underlying right, Indigenous Data Governance is what putting that right into practice looks like — and in practice it looks different for every people and place, because governance structures are appropriately determined by the relevant Indigenous Peoples themselves, not imposed from outside.
Named frameworks are distinct instruments
Several real, named frameworks sit under this umbrella. Each belongs to a specific people, place, or organisation, and none is a generic stand-in for the others:
- OCAP® Principles — trademark stewarded by the First Nations Information Governance Centre; explicitly First Nations-specific, Canada.
- CARE Principles — Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA), a broader cross-jurisdictional baseline complementing FAIR.
- Te Mana Raraunga — the Māori Data Sovereignty Network’s principles, Aotearoa New Zealand.
- Maiam nayri Wingara — the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Sovereignty Collective’s principles, Australia.
- Local Contexts’ TK Labels and BC Labels — item-level metadata communities apply to specific records or specimens.
- Cultural protocol — the community-specific rules every framework above is applied through.
A project may need more than one of these at once — for example, a First Nations community’s own body, expressed through OCAP®, alongside CARE as the cross-jurisdictional principle a funder references.
What this means for research administration
A data management plan, ethics application, or repository access policy should name the specific framework and, where one exists, the specific community-led body that applies — not cite "Indigenous data governance" as a generic category. Consent processes, access conditions, metadata labelling, and any data- or benefit-sharing agreement should be built around that framework’s actual requirements, established through direct engagement with the relevant cultural protocol, rather than a template drawn from a different people or place.
References
- Global Indigenous Data Alliance, CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (2019).
- First Nations Information Governance Centre, "The First Nations Principles of OCAP®," fnigc.ca/ocap-training.
Also known as
IDG
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
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