CONCEPT
Data Sovereignty
The principle — advanced by indigenous movements and developed within Escobar's pluriversal framework — that communities retain governance rights over the data, knowledge, and cultural expressions that AI systems extract from them as raw material.
Data sovereignty names a specific gap in the current AI architecture. The training data on which models are built includes knowledge produced by communities that did not consent to its inclusion, do not benefit from its use, and exercise no governance over the systems that incorporate it. Indigenous ecological knowledge, traditional cultural expressions, locally produced content in languages whose speakers the models' governance structures do not include — all of this enters the training pipeline as raw material rather than as intellectual contribution. Data sovereignty frameworks would establish that communal knowledge is a contribution entitled to recognition, compensation, and governance rights.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept emerged most forcefully from indigenous movements, particularly the First Nations Information Governance Centre in Canada, which developed the OCAP principles (Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession) for indigenous data governance. Te Mana Raraunga in Aotearoa/New Zealand has developed a parallel framework for Māori data sovereignty. The CARE Principles (Collective benefit,