Vision Mātauranga

Through engagement with Māori researchers, iwi and hapū collaborators, and the National Iwi Chairs’ Forum, the following four themes have been identified as the focus for the Vision Mātauranga programme:

We are seeking to further Māori aspirations for disaster resilience. We are building Māori capability in hazards and resilience, co-developing resilience solutions with hapori Māori, ensuring hazards modelling and tools reflect Māori values and needs, and strengthening learning from past events and experiences.

Māori live in cities, towns, papakāinga and rural settlements, and the programme works across all of these spaces and places.

This work delivers on Te Rautaki Māori mō te Manawaroa, the Platform’s Māori Strategy for 2026-2031. The Strategy sets our four pou – place, people, knowledge and systems – that shape everything the programme funds.

The four pou stand together and are designed to reinforce one another – remove one and the others cannot hold.

• Pou Kāinga – Place: Enduring Māori Research Partnerships. Resilience starts at place. Marae, hapū, iwi and Māori community organisations are the foundation of resilience before, during and after events. This pou embeds reciprocal, co-developed research relationships with iwi, hapū, marae and urban Māori communities, including acceptable risk frameworks, marae and papakāinga resilience, community-centred decision-making and adaptation pathways.
• Pou Kaiārahi – People: Strengthening Māori Capability and Leadership. Growing the Māori researchers, practitioners and future leaders needed across hazards and resilience science, through capability pathways, research training, postgraduate and early-career positions embedded in projects, and leadership roles within the Platform and the wider resilience system.
• Pou Mātauranga – Knowledge: Māori-Informed Hazard, Risk and Taiao Knowledge. Ensuring hazard modelling, exposure analysis, data and decision-support tools reflect Māori realities, taiao and mātauranga-informed indicators, with Māori data sovereignty built into the architecture from the outset rather than added later.
• Pou Pūnaha – Systems: Social Cohesion, Trauma and System Learning. Strengthening how the resilience system learns, through research on post-event experiences, trauma, misinformation, inequities in disaster impacts, and the social dimensions of recovery – moving from lessons identified to lessons implemented.

Vision Mātauranga research is not confined to this programme. The following projects are led by Māori researchers and funded through other Platform themes.

• Breaking the loop: Systems audit of natural hazard decision-making, knowledge translation and action (joint project between the Better Resilience Decisions and Living with Risk themes)
• He Ara Whakahaere: Māori risk perceptions and adaptation futures (Living with Risk theme)

Some of our research projects are funded at short notice, after a significant natural hazard event, to capture data and insights that would otherwise be lost.

The Platform holds a small contingency fund for post-event research through its Post-Event Research, Insights and Learning (PERIL) function, and the Vision Mātauranga programme works alongside this function to ensure that where appropriate, Māori communities and Māori researchers can lead post-event research in their own rohe.

Further projects are in development, including in capability and leadership. We welcome contact from iwi, hapū, marae and Māori community organisations interested in working with the programme — contact us.

Te Rautaki Māori mō te Manawaroa: the Māori Strategy for the Natural Hazards and Resilience Platform, 2026–2031