It has been a little while since I last sat down to write here. In the meantime, the questions that have shaped much of my work have not become smaller. If anything, they have become more urgent.
We are collecting more information than ever before. We can map forests, track rainfall, follow supply chains, monitor wildlife and build dashboards that claim to show us the state of the world in real time. At the same time, many of the people whose lives are most affected by decisions about land, climate, development and conservation remain absent from the data that is used to make those decisions.
That contradiction has been on my mind.
I have written before about the importance of using the right numbers when we talk about Indigenous Peoples, and about the potential of citizen-generated data to help communities make their own priorities visible. Those arguments still stand. Good data can reveal a gap in health care, show that a school is not serving children in their first language, document a failure to consult a community, or demonstrate the effects of a project that might otherwise be dismissed as anecdotal. Data can be a powerful part of advocacy.
But there is a question that needs to come before all of that: who decides what is counted, how it is interpreted, who can access it, and what happens once it leaves a community?
For a long time, much of the conversation about data was framed as a simple shortage. We needed more data, better data, more detailed maps and quicker reporting. There is truth in that. There are still enormous blind spots in official statistics, particularly where Indigenous identity, land tenure, language, disability, gender, mobility and remoteness intersect. An incomplete picture produces incomplete policy. If a people are not counted, or if they are counted in a way that erases their identity and circumstances, it becomes far easier to overlook their rights and needs.
Yet a rush to close every data gap can create a new set of problems. The information collected about a community can be used to target, restrict, commercialize or displace it. A map of a customary territory may support a land claim, but it can also reveal sensitive sites to actors who have no right to know them.
A database of medicinal plants may look like a contribution to science, while its real effect is to make knowledge easier to extract and monetize.
A community survey may be designed with the best intentions and still take time, stories and trust without returning anything useful to the people who participated.
That is why I think we have to move beyond the idea that data is neutral. It is never just a collection of facts. It is a relationship of power.
From being counted to setting the terms
In practical terms, this means that inclusion cannot end with a checkbox on a survey form. It is not enough for institutions to add an Indigenous identifier to a national questionnaire, or to invite community representatives to validate a dataset after the most important decisions have already been made. These can be positive steps, but they are not the same as meaningful participation.
Meaningful participation begins much earlier. It asks whether the information should be collected in the first place. It asks who has defined the problem, who has designed the questions, what categories make sense locally, and whether people can safely decline to answer. It asks what will be shared back, in what language and format, and whether the data will remain useful to the community after the report is published and the project team has moved on.
This is particularly important for work involving Indigenous Peoples’ lands, territories, resources, cultures and knowledge. These are not simply data points waiting to be made legible to a government, a researcher or an investor. They are part of collective life, governance and identity. They can carry risks that are not visible on a spreadsheet.
There is an understandable enthusiasm around open data. Open information can help people hold governments accountable. It can allow researchers to compare trends, journalists to expose injustice, and communities to find evidence that has been kept out of sight. But “open” is not automatically the same as fair. Open for whom? Accessible to whom? Reusable by whom? And who bears the risk when sensitive information is made public?
These questions do not automatically mean we must reject data sharing or technology. They require us to be more serious about purpose and authority. A dataset can be technically excellent and still be unethical if it was collected without consent, interpreted without context, or released in a way that puts people at risk.
Community-generated evidence has a different starting point
This is one reason I continue to value approaches such as community and citizen-generated data. At their best, they do not begin with an institution asking communities to fill a gap in its own evidence base. They begin with people identifying what they need to know in order to claim rights, make decisions and tell their own stories.
I think that difference matters.
When communities define their own indicators, they are often able to capture things that conventional systems miss. A national database may record whether a water point exists. Community monitoring can show whether it works throughout the dry season, who is able to use it, whether the journey is safe, and how changes in land use are affecting the source.
A protected-area assessment may count hectares. Community members may identify the places that are important for grazing, ceremony, fishing, food, medicines, seasonal movement or intergenerational learning.
Neither kind of information is useless. The problem comes when one is automatically treated as the only information that counts.
The Indigenous Navigator has long demonstrated the value of communities gathering evidence on the implementation of their rights according to priorities that they themselves identify. Its importance is not only that it produces useful information. It is that it supports a process in which communities discuss their situation, build a shared picture of it, and use that picture in dialogue with authorities and other duty bearers. The data is connected to agency.
Of course, community-generated data is not a magic solution. It needs time, resources, accessibility, technical support where requested, and clear safeguards. It should not become another way of shifting the costs of monitoring from governments and institutions onto unpaid community members. Nor should outside organizations use participation as a label while retaining all meaningful control.
A participatory survey designed elsewhere, controlled elsewhere and used elsewhere is still an extractive process, even if it has a community meeting at the beginning.
Maps are decisions, too
The same is true of maps. I am increasingly interested in what GIS can make possible when they are placed in the hands of communities and used alongside local knowledge.
GIS can help visualize overlapping pressures: a proposed concession, a river, a customary boundary, a school, a migration route, a sacred place, a wildfire scar. It can help people explain a reality that is difficult to convey in a meeting room far from the territory being discussed.
But maps are not objective simply because they are digital. Every map involves choices: what to show, what to leave out, which boundary to recognize, whose place names to use, which date to treat as the baseline, and who can see the result. Those choices can support rights, or they can reinforce dispossession.
The best mapping processes I have encountered treat the map as a conversation rather than a final verdict. They create space for local governance, for discussion about what must remain confidential, and for communities to decide how a map will be used. They recognize that some knowledge is not meant to be placed on a public platform. Sometimes the most responsible map is one with deliberate blank spaces.
A simple test for better practice
As we enter an era of increasingly sophisticated data systems, I think institutions working with Indigenous Peoples can ask themselves a few straightforward questions.
Who benefits from this information? Who has the authority to approve its collection and use? What can go wrong if it is shared? What capacity, access and ownership remain after the project ends? And can the community say no – not only at the beginning, but later, if circumstances change?
These are not obstacles to good research, good conservation or good policy. They are conditions for doing that work responsibly.
There is a temptation, particularly in global development and environmental work, to believe that the next dashboard or satellite product will solve the problem of invisibility. Better tools may help. But tools are never a substitute for rights, relationships and accountability. The people most affected by decisions must be able to shape those decisions, and that includes the decisions made with their data.
Data is still power. The work ahead is to make sure that power does not continue to flow in only one direction.
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