The Pacific Data Sovereignty Network is a data governance initiative concerning Pacific peoples living in New Zealand. The PDSN brings together members and institutions primarily established in New Zealand around community-based data governance. This approach raises pertinent questions for small economies facing similar challenges.
The Essentials
- Data sovereignty can rest on community governance rather than physical infrastructure alone: this is the goal of the PDSN.
- The PDSN is a data sovereignty network for Pacific peoples established in Auckland in 2019.
- The Pacific Environment Data Portal, initially developed within the Inform project and currently linking 14 national portals, constitutes a potential field of application.
- The African Data Portal centralizes continental data: an opposing architecture that raises questions about the concentration of control at the regional level.
- The open question is that of sustainability: community governance depends on maintaining political commitment and respecting agreements.
The Pacific Facing a Constraint Unknown to Large Countries
Small island states in the Pacific share a situation that large economies do not know: a portion of their data—environmental, epidemiological, climate-related, cultural—is stored and processed on servers located outside their territory. Australia, New Zealand, and cloud providers host information resources of states that have neither the means nor the critical mass to build a local alternative.
The problem is both legal and political, not merely technical. External storage can affect control, but rules of access, use, and valorization also depend on agreements, licenses, and applicable laws. A government of Kiribati wishing to consult its own environmental records depends on the pricing conditions and regulatory framework of a third party. This dependency has several dimensions: infrastructure, applicable legal framework, and political balance.
The classical response consists of building: national data centers, fiber optic networks, sovereign processing capacities. For a country like Fiji or Vanuatu, the cost is prohibitive and the result potentially fragile, as local infrastructure remains vulnerable to larger actors who can offer better conditions and progressively capture uses.
The PDSN starts from a different approach: improving community governance of data.
Blockchain: Real Effects and Limits
The documented organization of the Pacific Data Sovereignty Network comprises a committee, a network, a secretariat, and the development of a charter. The PDSN documents principles of metadata governance without documented blockchain architecture. No technical guarantee of immutability of traces is documented for the PDSN. The PDSN does not document mechanisms for automated access through smart contracts enabling cross-border application.
The PDSN aims for governance frameworks; a technical guarantee of traceability and legal opposability of rights is not established. The PDSN does not present a documented regional data storage system. The PDSN concerns community governance of data of Pacific peoples in New Zealand.
Institutions from countries with strong capacity are involved in the network, indicating regional collaboration. The relationship between Australia and small Pacific states has long been marked by asymmetries. The PDSN aims to improve data governance.
The SPREP Pacific Environment Portal, launched in 2025 by the Secretariat of the Regional Seas Programme, constitutes a potential field of application. Environmental data collected in the region is strategic for states exposed to climate change. Appropriate governance can strengthen their position in international negotiations.
Two Trajectories for the Global South
The PDSN is not the only emerging response to the question of data sovereignty in low-resource economies. The African Data Portal represents an opposing trajectory and merits examination in its tension with the Pacific approach.
The African Data Portal centralizes African continental data in a unified architecture. The intention is to aggregate dispersed resources, create critical mass, and make data accessible to researchers and decision-makers who struggle to work with fragmented sources. The designers of the portal will need to clarify who controls the center of this architecture.
A centralized African infrastructure governed by African actors offers advantages over external dependency. However, centralization can pose risks of dependence on the center’s governance bodies. Effective control is tied to the composition of funders and governance bodies.
The two trajectories illustrate an important choice that small economies can explore. The centralized trajectory seeks power through aggregation. The decentralized trajectory seeks resilience through distribution. Both approaches could be compatible if an interoperable architecture is established from the outset.
This debate fits into broader questions about the position of small economies in a concentrated digital world. We find similar dynamics in the employment sector, where Global South countries that had found a model in IT outsourcing see their competitive advantages redistributed by AI, without necessarily having built alternatives.
The Acceleration of the PDSN During COVID in the Pacific
The PDSN was created before the pandemic, on November 29, 2019. The pandemic raised questions about the governance of epidemiological data shared between national authorities and regional surveillance systems. This situation demonstrated the importance of clear governance over the use of data by the various actors involved.
The crisis raised concrete questions about data governance in emergency situations. New Zealand government bodies demonstrated concrete interest in the PDSN through memoranda of understanding signed in August 2022.
Crises can accelerate the adoption of new approaches in several areas. Industrial sovereignty regained appeal after supply chain disruptions during the pandemic. Digital sovereignty follows comparable logic: dependency becomes visible at the moment it creates real cost, and it is this moment that opens a political window for alternative architectures.
A difficulty lies in maintaining engagement after the acute phase of the crisis. Once the immediate crisis has passed, alternative architectures must demonstrate their value in durable uses.
Expected Decisions by 2030
The PDSN documents governance by committee and secretariat, with needs for data infrastructures, potential partnerships with island nations, and funding.
Two trajectories merit examination. The first is that of a network gaining strength: member states maintain their political commitment, smart contracts prove their robustness on varied use cases, other regions—the Caribbean, small island states of the Indian Ocean—adopt similar or interoperable architectures. In this scenario, the PDSN becomes a documented model and community governance an option considered for small economies. The University of Auckland and the Australian Academy of Science could play the role of scientific partners in this trajectory.
The second trajectory is that of progressive erosion. Technical mechanisms alone do not resolve political disagreements between states over the definition of rights or conditions of access. The document does not specify a mechanism for resolving interstate disputes, because it does not document governance between states. The absence of an explicit resolution mechanism could facilitate recourse to bilateral agreements parallel to the collective framework.
The consolidation of the PDSN relies on governance, infrastructures, community collaboration, and the search for funding.
The signals to observe by 2030 are concrete. The first is the SPREP Pacific Environment Portal: documented integration into the PDSN and its use by external actors would provide an indicator of functioning. The second signal is the attitude of large scientific data platforms toward the access conditions set by the PDSN. Their acceptance would indicate a change in negotiation dynamics. Their circumvention would reveal the limits of governance without its own infrastructure.
The real PDSN aims at governance of data relating to Pacific communities in Aotearoa. The PDSN has formulated an approach to community governance and the development of data charters. This approach merits being followed, tested, criticized, and improved by other regions facing comparable challenges. The African creative economy offers a terrain for comparison: there too, local actors circumvent infrastructural dependencies through distributed solutions, with results that are beginning to weigh in the global debate over who controls the digital resources of the Global South.
Sources
- Data Science Journal (2025), Pacific Data Sovereignty Network, University of Auckland / CODATA
- SPREP Pacific Environment Portal, Secretariat of the Regional Seas Programme (launched 2025)
- Australian Academy of Science, PDSN partnership (institutional documentation)
- African Data Portal, African Union / UNECA (regional data portal)
