Kaitiakitanga
The AI lifecycle involves designers and developers, deployers and users, and governance practitioners. Across this lifecycle, engagement with AI is inherently an engagement with the natural world. Developers and designers rely on land, data, and water to keep their AI tools running. Users consume natural resources by engaging with AI tools. Governance practitioners are confronted with many questions, of which one concerns the ways in which the use of resources should not amount to exploitation, extraction, and appropriation. This is an ongoing challenge that needs a meaningful framework to address. Kaitiakitanga, from the Māori tradition, offers us that framework.
Before proceeding, we want to state that Kaitiakitanga is a living concept embedded in Māori law, governance, and spiritual life. It has been formally incorporated into New Zealand law, which means it has both, a legal and philosophical existence. Its legal existence has also been contested, expanded upon, and sometimes diluted through political processes. We draw on the philosophical and ethical core of the concept while acknowledging that its legal history is complex and that Māori communities continue to assert and defend its meaning against interpretations that weaken it. We welcome correction and deeper engagement from those who carry this tradition.
Understanding Kaitiakitanga
Originating from the root word kaitiaki meaning guardian, trustee, or steward, Kaitiakitanga describes the sacred responsibility of care that humans owe to the natural world around them. In Māori thought, this responsibility flows from whakapapa, or the genealogical connections that link human beings to the natural world, including the mountains, rivers, forests, and the sea. Humans are kin to these entities and thus bear the responsibility of kinship toward them. This makes them responsible for ensuring that they protect, nurture, and ensure their wellbeing across generations. This relationship with the natural world is distinct from the ownership model that is intrinsic to Western property law and the stewardship model in Western environmentalism.
Kaitiakitanga does not call for the wise management of resources on behalf of human users. It asks humans to fulfil their obligations to its relatives, namely the natural world. These obligations are not about maintaining utility so that the value of the natural world can be extracted and appropriated without care. This means that the natural world is not a pool of resources for human use, but rather an ancestor to be honoured for their own sake.
Kaitiakitanga operates across time in a way that most governance frameworks do not. The obligations of the kaitiaki extend beyond the present community to the ancestors who shaped the land and the descendants who will inherit it. Decisions are evaluated by whether they honour the past and protect the future, rather than by their immediate, short-term consequences. Kaitiakitanga is a seven-generational ethic made concrete.
What Kaitiakitanga unsettles in AI governance
Current approaches to AI governance are almost entirely focused on the present and centre the human. They focus on the harms that may ensue from an AI system to current human users, often centring on the immediate and medium term. Kaitiakitanga asks us to extend this focus to non-human beings and to intergenerational time.
Kaitiakitanga challenges the treatment of land, natural resources, and data across the AI lifecycle. In the Māori worldview, data generated by a community, including all its stories, knowledge, language, and more, cannot be reduced to mere raw material to be extracted. It forms part of the living heritage that a community holds in trust for the present and future. The use of data without consent and without reciprocity breaches Kaitiakitanga, as it is a failure to honour the obligations of guardianship that the community holds towards its own heritage. Western frameworks would stop with looking at such uses of data as a privacy violation, but Kaitiakitanga asks us to go further.
Accordingly, Kaitiakitanga invites governance to take intergenerational accountability seriously enough to not stop with a rhetorical commitment, but to make a structural one. It asks us to introspect on the mechanisms that exist at present to ensure that AI systems being developed today do not foreclose options for future generations. It asks us what it would mean to govern AI as kaitiaki, by serving as guardians acting in trust for all those who come after us.
Kaitiakitanga has already demonstrated its capacity to reshape governance in practice. For instance, the legal recognition of the Whanganui River as a legal person in New Zealand, grounded in Māori understandings of the river as an ancestor, is a concrete example of what governance looks like when Kaitiakitanga is taken seriously instead of merely being cited as an inspiration.
In effect, Kaitiakitanga asks us what we are holding in trust and for whom. Across the AI lifecycle, it asks AI developers, deployers, users, and regulators to understand themselves not as owners or managers but as temporary guardians of something that does not belong to them: The data, knowledge, algorithm, natural resources, and the social fabric AI draws on and transforms. It asks us to think ahead, and imagine whether, seven generations from now, if the people who inherit the world we are making will be grateful for the choices we are making in this moment.
References
Boyd, D. R. (2017). The rights of nature: A legal revolution that could save the world. ECW press.
Kawharu, M. (2000). Kaitiakitanga: A Māori anthropological perspective of the Māori socio-environmental ethic of resource management. The journal of the Polynesian society, 109(4), 349-370.
Marsden, M., & Royal, T. A. C. (2003). The woven universe: selected writings of Rev. Māori Marsden.
Mead, H. (2003). Chapter 20: Nga ahi e ngiha mai nei: the fires that flare up in Tikanga Māori: living by Māori values. Wellington New Zealand.
Mead, S. M. (2003). Tikanga: Living by Values.
Wareka, M. L. (2020). Te Mauri o te Kaitiaki-Exploring Te Ao Māori in environmental relations and kaitiakitanga in Aotearoa New Zealand (Doctoral dissertation, The University of Waikato).
This article draws from the wisdom and work of the Māori people. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider donating to Indigenous groups, collectives, organizations, or initiatives to support their lives and work.
