Year: 2026
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The call for sustainable enterprise is omnipresent – yet the ontological frameworks from which Indigenous peoples have sustained ecologies across millennia remain peripheral to dominant sustainability discourse. This chapter examines Māori social enterprises in Aotearoa New Zealand as institutional sites in which this tension is negotiated and, in some cases, transcended. Drawing on Secondary Comparative Case Analysis (SCCA) of three secondary cases – Māori participation in Fonterra Co-operative Group, the Iwi Collective Partnership (ICP), and Miraka Ltd – we construct a typology of cross-cultural sustainability engagement. Two analytical dimensions structure the typology: (1) governing logic – whether the constitutive governance framework derives from kaitiakitanga (the Māori ethic of intergenerational environmental guardianship) or from extractive capitalist rationality; and (2) governance authority distribution – whether decision-making power is redistributed to Māori communal governance or retained within non-Māori commercial architectures. The intersection yields three modes: Extractive, dialogical, and transformative. We argue that sustainability engagement redistributes governance authority only when the enterprise’s governing logic derives from an Indigenous ontology. The central contribution is the decolonial threshold as a governance criterion: The typology demonstrates that Māori social enterprises, at their most developed, instantiate ontologically distinct sustainability architectures that extractive and dialogical governance cannot produce. A post-analysis note () discloses the 2025 acquisition of Miraka Limited and analyses its implications for transformative mode governance durability.
Source: IntechOpen eBooks
Author: Milena Valeva
Institution: Trier University of Applied Sciences
Language: English
Subfield: Health
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Funder: University of Waikato
OpenAlex ID: W7168784358