A conservation project is also a data project. Who governs that data?
Indigenous knowledge could sit at the center of conservation, and so does the question of who controls the data behind it. A story from ASU’s Conservation Futures Academy lays out nine ideas, and where to learn them.
Every habitat map, GPS point and recorded oral history is information about a people and a place. Indigenous data sovereignty is the right of Indigenous peoples to govern that information, and it is reshaping how conservation gets done around the world. A new story from the Conservation Futures Academy walks through the frameworks that put the principle into practice, from CARE and OCAP to why consent has to continue over time.
Two disciplines, one story
The essay names a distinction most conservation training blurs. Governing data is one skill, and building the community partnership that produces the data is another. It pairs the two, because a project can honor a community in the room and still mishandle its knowledge in a database. Both skills show up in the Academy’s Indigenous courses, one on data sovereignty and one on conservation partnerships.
Why ASU teaches this
The Conservation Futures Academy is the professional learning arm of the Rob Walton School of Conservation Futures, part of ASU Learning Enterprise. It prepares the conservation workforce for the global goal of conserving 30% of land and ocean by 2030. Its Indigenous programs are built with Indigenous faculty, and the ideas in them come from Indigenous scholars and communities. That approach is already drawing people to the work: the Academy’s first cohort brought together 66 professionals from North and South America, the Pacific and Africa, most of them Indigenous or partners in Indigenous-led conservation.
What the story covers
The full piece lays out nine ideas in plain terms. It explains why “open” data has limits, how the CARE and OCAP frameworks work, why a flattering statistic can still be extractive and what it means to treat data as kin, a relative to care for. It closes with the two courses where conservation professionals learn to practice each one.
Read the full piece: Data is kin: nine ideas reshaping Indigenous-led conservation.