CARE Principles

Research Data
Responsible Scholarship

What are the CARE Principles?

The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance are a set of guidelines that complement the FAIR principles by focusing on people and purpose in data management, particularly for Indigenous data. CARE stands for Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics. These principles were developed by the Global Indigenous Data Alliance to ensure that data practices support Indigenous communities’ self-determination and promote equitable outcomes for Indigenous peoples.

While originally developed for Indigenous data, the CARE principles have broader applicability to research involving any communities or populations, particularly those that have been historically marginalised or disadvantaged. They emphasise community engagement, ethical responsibility, and the importance of ensuring that data use benefits the communities from which data originate.

The CARE principles

The CARE principles encompass four key areas:

Collective Benefit

Data ecosystems shall be designed and function in ways that enable Indigenous Peoples to derive benefit from the data. This is specified in the following ways:

  • Inclusive development and innovation: Data should support Indigenous innovation and generate value for Indigenous communities. Use and reuse of data by Indigenous Peoples should be enabled and stimulated by governments and research institutions.
  • Community value creation: Data ecosystems should be designed to support Indigenous communities’ self-determination and collective benefit, and to foster transparency, engagement and understanding between Indigenous Peoples and their (local) governments and policymakers.
  • Equitable outcomes: Data use should promote equitable outcomes for Indigenous peoples and communities and contribute to Indigenous aspirations for wellbeing.

Authority to Control

Indigenous Peoples’ must have the right and authority to control their data and how they and information about them are represented in data. This is specified further as follows:

  • Rights recognition: Indigenous Peoples have inherent rights and interests relating to Indigenous data and to individual and collective Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC).
  • Data for governance: Indigenous Peoples have the right to (access to) data that empower their world-view, self-determination and self-governance.
  • Governance of data: Indigenous Peoples have the right to determine what happens to their data.

Responsibility

Those working with Indigenous data are responsible for showing that the data use supports and benefits Indigenous Peoples. They also have to be transparent about how the data are used. This is specified as follows:

  • Positive relationships: Researchers and data users should build respectful, trusted and reciprocal relationships with Indigenous Communities.
  • For expanding capability and capacity: Those working with the data should support Indigenous Peoples’ capacity to work with data capability to develop infrastructure for data.
  • For Indigenous languages and worldviews: Those working with the data should provide resources that enable generating and collecting data in Indigenous languages and cultural contexts.

Ethics

Indigenous People’s rights and wellbeing should be the primary concern for data users during the entire data lifecycle. This is specified in the following points:

  • Minimising harm and maximising benefit: Data use should minimise harm and risks to Indigenous communities and should be collected and used according to Indigenous Peoples’ frameworks. Benefits should be assessed based on Indigenous Peoples’ perspectives.
  • Justice: Data practices should promote justice and representation for Indigenous Peoples
  • Future use: Data governance must include considerations for future use and prevent potential future misuse of data according to the Indigenous People’s frameworks.

Implementation of the CARE principles

Like the FAIR principles, the CARE principles must be implemented consciously and conscientiously, and specific effort must be made to support them in research-performing institutions. That said, it is important to emphasise that the purpose of the CARE principles is fundamentally different from the FAIR principles. The FAIR principles aim to promote transparency and maximum data reuse potential, which can create an image of data as a neutral, independent entity. Under the CARE principles, data collected by/with/about Indigenous Peoples are understood as fundamentally tied to these Indigenous Peoples and the CARE principles underscore their ownership, authority and rights to the data. While data reuse can occur and/or be beneficial for Indigenous Peoples data, it is not always the best outcome or the primary aim.

In the context of the Netherlands research-performing institutions could consider the following to support researchers with implementing the CARE principles:

  • Making researchers aware of the CARE principles and helping them to find resources for their application in their field.
  • Supporting international working groups and alliances that develop the CARE principles further, such as the Global Indigenous Data Alliance and the Research Data Alliance (RDA’s) International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group.
  • Making Indigenous data FAIR, bearing in mind the considerations outlined above.
  • Applying the CARE principles to their own collections and services.

Indigenous data in university (library) collections

Universities and other research-performing institutions may already be holding data concerning Indigenous Peoples, whether they be research data or archives or objects in a university library’s (special) collections. This means that universities and university libraries have responsibilities with regards to the CARE principles.

Where research data are concerned, it is mostly important to ensure that free, prior and informed consent was given for the data to be collected and/or published, and that the data were also initially shared with the Indigenous People from which they originated. At VU Amsterdam, data stewards already have experience with similar processes around (regular) personal data. If you find that you are working with, or your department holds datasets to which the CARE principles apply, and you have questions about how they should be handled, your first point of contact may be the RDM Support Desk or your faculty’s data steward.

Library (special) collections may also require some care, especially if researchers would like to use them. At the 2025 LIBER Conference in Lausanne (Switzerland) a roundtable comprising of librarians who specialise in Indigenous Knowledges and/or had an Indigenous background discussed the ways libraries can incorporate Indigenous Knowledges and collections in their services while taking the CARE principles into account. The roundtable highlighted the fact that Indigenous Peoples may historically not have been included in libraries’ collection development and collection access, and that due to a historical legacy of colonialism and racism, existing library catalogues may contain terms and descriptions that are inaccurate, offensive and harmful. The roundtable further raised that library staff need to be more aware of these issues in managing their collections. To actively engage with some of these concerns, the VU University Library started a working group to revisit descriptions of works in the library catalogue through the lens of decolonisation. In this way, the working group tries to contribute to a more inclusive library environment for diverse users.

Sources and resources

  • The definitions of the CARE principles were taken from: Research Data Alliance International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group. (September 2019). “CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.” The Global Indigenous Data Alliance. GIDA-global.org. More in-depth information can be found there.
  • The recommendations for implementation of the CARE principles were taken from: Carroll, S.R., Herczog, E., Hudson, M. et al. Operationalizing the CARE and FAIR Principles for Indigenous data futures. Sci Data 8, 108 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00892-0.
  • Practical examples of implementation of the CARE principles are given in: Carroll, S, et al. 2020. The CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Data Science Journal, 19: XX, pp. 1–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2020-042.
  • A slide deck containing practical recommendations for putting the CARE principles into action can be found at Lushaj, B., Gelens, T., Magraw, J.-Y., Mos, A., Baloum, R.-C., & Hati Gitundu, (Beatrice) B.H. (2025, June 10). Workshop on The Ethics of Sharing Fieldwork Data and the CARE Principles. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15629394
  • The programme of the 2025 LIBER Conference, with the description of the roundtable on page 158.
  • A presentation on the working group at the VU University Library to remove harmful subject headings in the catalogue was also given at the 2024 LIBER Conference.

AI statement

A first draft of this text was written by Claude LLM. It was subsequently edited and rewritten by Handbook editors.