It's Not All Doomed (with receipts!)
Written by Nhiyc
Editor: Lucija Ajvazoski
In 2019, the South African government formally recognised the Khoi and San peoples' rights over Rooibos, a plant their communities had farmed and used medicinally for generations. Nestlé had attempted to patent its uses nearly a decade earlier, in 2010, without any reference to that history. The recognition established a benefit-sharing agreement that now generates direct revenue for those communities.
It took nine years of negotiations. It required sustained legal challenge and organised advocacy. It is still incomplete: recent research finds the white-dominated rooibos industry still controls 93% of tea lands, meaning the agreement has not yet transformed who benefits most from the plant. But it happened. A community asserted sovereignty over knowledge that had been taken from them, and a legal framework recognised that claim.
This is what progress looks like in data and knowledge sovereignty: specific, hard-won, incomplete, and real. It does not look like a single policy breakthrough or a technology solution. It looks like communities building governance frameworks, lawyers finding legal angles, institutions changing slowly under sustained pressure, and people refusing to accept that extraction is just how things work.
There is more of this happening than most coverage of the tech and climate crisis suggests.
Indigenous data sovereignty is not theory
The most developed examples of data sovereignty in practice come from Indigenous communities, which makes sense. These are communities with the longest experience of having their knowledge extracted, their governance ignored, and their data used against them. They have also been developing formal responses for decades.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Maori Data Sovereignty Network (Te Mana Raraunga) has built community frameworks for controlling research data about Maori communities, asserting rights over data collected by the Crown, and developing Maori data governance principles that have influenced national policy. This is not a position paper. It is implemented governance, operating in relationship with state institutions.
In Canada, the First Nations Information Governance Centre developed OCAP principles: Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession. These principles are now legally recognised in health research contexts. Indigenous communities can refuse data use, set conditions on how their data is used, and have those conditions enforced. The framework has been in development since the 1990s and is still expanding.
Globally, the Global Indigenous Data Alliance coordinates international work on Indigenous data sovereignty and developed the CARE Principles: Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics. These complement the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) that dominate scientific data governance, adding the governance and ethics dimensions that FAIR leaves out.
In the Amazon, the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA) has developed territorial monitoring systems controlled by communities rather than outside researchers or conservation organisations. The data about their territories is governed by the communities whose territories they are.
These frameworks share a common logic: data governance is not a technical problem requiring a technical solution. It is a sovereignty question requiring political recognition and institutional change. The communities building these frameworks understood that before the rest of the world started talking about data governance.
The Global South is leading, not waiting
A persistent framing in international climate and tech policy positions Global South communities as recipients of solutions developed elsewhere. The actual landscape is more interesting than that.
The Pacific Data Hub is a regional initiative through which Small Island Developing States coordinate climate vulnerability data and assert control over how their crisis is narrated internationally. Pacific Island nations are not passive subjects of climate data collection. They are building the institutional capacity to govern their own data and challenge the extractive relationships that have characterised international research in their region.
Slum Dwellers International runs community-led data collection on climate vulnerability in informal settlements across the Global South. The data is owned by residents. This is not a pilot project. It operates across hundreds of cities and has directly influenced urban planning and climate adaptation policy in multiple countries.
In Latin America, regional climate networks have developed community-based monitoring programmes that explicitly reject parachute research models, where outside researchers arrive, collect data, and leave with it. The data stays with the communities. The research relationships are governed by the communities being researched.
The African Centre for Technology Studies has developed data governance frameworks explicitly centred on African sovereignty rather than adapting Western frameworks. The work starts from different assumptions about community, ownership, and the relationship between data and governance.
Data cooperatives are proving the economic model
A common objection to data sovereignty is economic: critics argue that the current extractive model generates enormous value, and alternative models cannot compete. The evidence for this is weaker than commonly presented, and existing examples are increasingly challenging it, even where progress is hard.
In transportation, the Drivers Cooperative in New York City is a worker-owned platform cooperative where drivers own the platform, own their data, and receive a share of the profits. The model is a direct alternative to Uber and Lyft's extraction logic and the cooperative has grown into a multi-million dollar operation supporting over 200 drivers. It has not been without difficulty: the cooperative has faced real financial constraints and governance challenges in its early years, which its own founder has acknowledged publicly. It is proof of concept, not a finished product. But the concept stands: a worker-owned model can operate in this market.
Similarly, Fairbnb operates as a cooperative alternative to Airbnb, with community data ownership and economic benefit retained locally rather than extracted to a platform. Salus Coop gives health data cooperative members control over their health data and a share of the economic value it generates. Patient-led research networks in multiple countries are demonstrating that participants can govern how their health data is used without the research becoming less rigorous.
In agriculture, farmers' cooperatives in India are building community-controlled alternatives to precision agriculture platforms that extract farming knowledge and sell it back as a service. Growing Field in the US operates as an agricultural data trust that keeps farmers' data sovereign.
These are not charity projects subsidised by idealism. They are organisations demonstrating that data does not have to be extracted to generate value, and that the model is viable even when building it is hard.
Legal wins are creating precedents
Vanuatu led a coalition of 132 nations to bring a request for an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on climate change and human rights. In July 2025, the ICJ delivered that opinion, for the first time specifying states' obligations under international law in respect of climate change and finding that failing to act may constitute an internationally wrongful act. It is a small Pacific Island nation that, through sustained diplomatic organising and community-governed data about what is happening to its coastline, its fresh water, and its land, helped shift international law.
In the Netherlands, the Hague District Court ruled in January 2026 that the Dutch government breached the European Convention on Human Rights by failing to protect residents of Bonaire, a Dutch Caribbean island, from the impacts of climate change. The court found the state had discriminated against Bonaire's residents by not developing a climate adaptation plan for the island, despite knowing for decades that it faced severe climate risk. The Netherlands was ordered to set binding emissions reduction targets and develop an adaptation plan. It was the first court in the world to rule that a state is discriminating against its own people by failing to develop a climate adaptation strategy.
ClientEarth and similar organisations have built a litigation model based on using companies' own emissions data against them in court, setting precedents across European jurisdictions. Torres Strait Islanders brought a case against Australia using data on rising seas threatening their lands.
These cases share a structure: communities with strong data governance, legal organisations with the capacity to translate that data into legal argument, and courts willing to recognise community-governed data as evidence. None of them would be possible without the data sovereignty work happening at community level.
Alternative infrastructure is being built
Community mesh networks are operational in multiple cities. NYC Mesh provides community-owned internet infrastructure to tens of thousands of residents in New York. Guifi.net in Catalonia is one of the largest community-owned telecommunications networks in the world. The Detroit Community Technology Project builds community-controlled internet infrastructure in a city that has historically been underserved by commercial providers. Indigenous community networks in Canada and Australia are providing connectivity governed by the communities they serve.
Worker-owned cooperative cloud hosting exists. May First Movement Technology provides cooperative cloud infrastructure to social justice organisations globally. Autonomic Cooperative in the UK operates worker-owned technical infrastructure. These are not at the scale of AWS or Google Cloud. They are proof that the model works and that the dependency on extractive infrastructure is a choice, not a technical necessity.
Federated protocols are demonstrating that decentralised social infrastructure is viable. The Fediverse, built on ActivityPub, now hosts millions of users across thousands of independently operated servers. No single corporation owns it. No single corporation can extract from it in the way surveillance capitalism requires. It is slower to build features than a VC-funded platform. It is also still here, still growing, and still governed by its communities.
What the pattern tells us
Across all of these examples, the pattern is consistent. Progress on data sovereignty happens when communities assert specific rights over specific data in specific contexts, build governance frameworks that reflect their own values and relationships rather than importing Western property frameworks, find legal and institutional allies willing to recognise those frameworks, and sustain the organising long enough for the frameworks to become embedded.
It rarely happens through individual consumer choices. It does not happen through a single legal victory or a single policy change. It happens through the accumulation of specific wins in specific places, each one creating a precedent and a model that the next community can build on.
Hope is strategic here because despair is convenient for the people benefiting from the current system. Apocalyptic framing, the idea that extraction is inevitable, that tech monopolies are too powerful to challenge, that data sovereignty is idealistic, serves the interests of those doing the extracting. The evidence does not support it.
The Maori Data Sovereignty Network exists. The Drivers Cooperative exists, imperfect and still building. Vanuatu went to the ICJ and won a historic opinion. Rooibos has a benefit-sharing agreement, contested and incomplete. Community mesh networks are providing internet access. These are not consolation prizes. They are the actual shape of structural change: specific, hard-won, incomplete, and real.
The final article in this series is the practical one. What you can actually do, wherever you are, with whatever resources you have. Check it out here.
This article is part of a series expanding on the conversations from Panic with a Purpose, a podcast exploring data, AI, and justice for people and the planet. Episode 1 on Data Sovereignty, Democracy, and Ownership is out now.
