Across food, tourism, cosmetics, and luxury goods, indigenous language and heritage increasingly anchor premium market positions, but when it comes to trademarks, few jurisdictions have developed national rules to explicitly protect and preserve traditional knowledge. This column looks at the case of New Zealand, where the Māori Advisory Committee advises the Commissioner of Trademarks on whether registration of a trademark incorporating Māori signs is likely to be offensive to Māori. This embedded collective governance mechanism raises the cost of new entry in New Zealand but increases the value of existing trademarks held there.
In May 2024, World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) member states adopted the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, which established certain disclosure requirements for patent applications where the claimed invention is based on genetic resources or traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources. After more than two decades of negotiations, the treaty represents international consensus that existing IP systems may be a tool to help prevent misappropriation of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge.
Notably, the treaty covers only patents and does not cover traditional cultural expressions. For trademarks, which are increasingly used for the commercialisation of indigenous language and imagery, only a few jurisdictions have developed national rules to explicitly protect and preserve traditional knowledge (WIPO 2012). A pioneering example of embedding cultural review in trademark registration is New Zealand.
New Zealand is the second-largest honey exporter by value, despite producing only about 1% of global volume. Trademarks incorporating the Māori word mānuka command export prices roughly seven times the global honey average (Guardian 2022). We argue that these trademarks might not only capture the higher quality and health benefits of Mānuka honey, but also the cultural meaning of a term derived from the Māori language and practice, which has additional consumer appeal and increases willingness to pay (Bowles 1998).
Across food, tourism, cosmetics, and luxury goods, indigenous language and heritage increasingly anchor premium market positions (Michalopoulos and Xue 2021). Unrestricted access invites misappropriation: prior studies document firms patenting traditional knowledge and genetic resources from Indian turmeric to Amazonian ayahuasca without community consent (Castaldi et al. 2024). The more widely cultural resources are misappropriated, the less they sustain the premium that attracted commercial interest in the first place (Hess and Ostrom 2007).
Existing remedies offer limited choices. Sui generis registries and cultural heritage declarations protect indigenous symbols either by removing them from the market or restricting access to community-defined terms. Ex-post mechanisms like trademark opposition or invalidation impose costs only after misuse has occurred. Neither approach seems to encourage responsible firms to engage legitimately with cultural resources while ensuring that communities retain meaningful oversight. The question is whether market institutions can be designed to protect cultural resources from misappropriation without foreclosing market access entirely.
In recent research (Amoncio et al. 2026), we analyse in the Māori context the concept of embedded collective governance, a design that places culturally informed review directly inside the market access institution, co-producing entry decisions between the state and those with cultural expertise.
The embedded collective governance mechanism operates through two channels:
Together, the two channels can reduce misappropriation while sustaining the exchange that gives cultural resources their economic value.
We test embedded collective governance with New Zealand’s Trade Marks Act 2002, which came into force in 2003 and established the Māori Advisory Committee within the trademark registration system. The Act’s creation reflects a longer arc. The landmark Wai 262 claim, filed before the Waitangi Tribunal in 1991, argued that the state intellectual property (IP) system had failed to protect Māori traditional knowledge and cultural expressions. The Act was part of the government’s response, embedding a dedicated review step inside the registration process for the first time.
The Māori Advisory Committee advises the Commissioner of Trademarks on whether registration of a trademark incorporating Māori signs is likely to be offensive to Māori. The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand automatically cross-references each trademark application against four Māori dictionaries, and any match triggers committee review. Committee members are selected for expertise in mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge systems) and tikanga Māori (customary practice). The committee votes on each application; contested cases proceed to quarterly deliberation. The Commissioner is not legally bound by Māori Advisory Committee advice, but in practice, the Commissioner has consistently followed it, making the advisory function de facto binding.
The committee’s criteria are more specific than what can usually be found in trademark law. Trademarks invoking sacred names, ancestral figures, or revered geographic sites are declined, particularly when associated with products like alcohol. The committee also guards against linguistic enclosure. As one current member explained: “We won’t approve single-word usage of the Māori language, because that is an attempt to capture the language. So, there’s got to be a descriptor with it.” Companies seeking to register ‘mānuka’ alone were declined; compound trademarks such as Mānuka Gold or Mānuka Health were permitted.
Two important limits deserve acknowledgement. The Māori Advisory Committee does not confer formal authority on the Māori community over registration decisions; it introduces a procedural review step that the Commissioner consistently follows, but formal decision power remains with the state. And the Māori Advisory Committee’s threshold – preventing ‘offensive’ use – is narrower than the rights many Māori groups seek. The Wai 262 claimants and their successors, the Wai 262 Taumata Whakapumau, for example, seek recognition of tino rangatiratanga (self-determination) over mātauranga Māori and taonga, including rights to free, prior, and informed consent before commercial use. In this way, the Māori Advisory Committee is perceived as a significant institutional step, not a complete solution.
We apply a natural language processing classifier trained on Māori linguistic structure to TM-Link, a cross-jurisdictional trademark-family database issued by IP Australia that covers filings across New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the EU, the UK, and the US offices from 1993 to 2013 (Petrie et al. 2020). The classifier draws on the Te Aka Māori Dictionary and phonological rules of the Māori language, mirroring the process that the Intellectual Property Office uses to flag trademark applications for Māori Advisory Committee review. The family structure of TM-Link dataset allows us to compare the same trademark filed by the same firm in New Zealand and abroad, before and after the 2003 reform.
Figure 1 Trademark-level estimates for Māori-related trademark registrations
The results confirm both channels. At the trademark level, Māori-related trademarks were 12.7 percentage points less likely to be registered in New Zealand relative to the same trademarks filed abroad after the reform – confirming screening at registration. Registered Māori-related trademarks were 12.4 percentage points less likely to expire – the certification premium at renewal. Both effects concentrate entirely among commercially active trademarks, those with an active use claim at the United States Patent and Trademark Office. There is no significant effect among non-commercialised filings. The mechanism of embedded collective governance operates on trademarks with genuine marketplace presence, not on speculative or defensive registrations.
By comparing the number of Māori related trademarks at the applicant level, the firm portfolio-level analysis confirms the same patterns and adds a further finding. Firms reduced new Māori-related registrations at the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand by approximately 38% relative to comparison jurisdictions after the reform. Registered Māori-related trademarks were approximately 42% less likely to expire. Among the subset of experienced cross-jurisdictional filers, firms reduced New Zealand registrations by approximately 37% while simultaneously retaining trademarks already held there at higher rates. Event-study estimates show clean pre-trends at both levels, and a placebo test assigning a false reform date in the pre-period yields no significant effect.
The embedded collective governance mechanism raises the cost of new entry in New Zealand but increases the value of existing trademarks held there. Firms respond rationally: they might redirect some of their new filings toward jurisdictions without culturally informed review while holding their certified trademarks at higher rates. Screening in one jurisdiction does not eliminate potential misappropriation in other jurisdictions. A trademark declined at the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand can still be registered at the US Patent and Trademark Office, the EU Intellectual Property Office, or IP Australia, where no Māori Advisory Committee-equivalent review exists.
This finding has a direct policy implication. Coordination mechanisms that extend culturally informed review across jurisdictions could reduce this asymmetry. Without such coordination, the protective effect of any single jurisdiction’s review remains partial and geographically bounded. The 2024 WIPO treaty’s disclosure requirement for patents points toward this kind of multilateral coordination; the question is whether similar international architecture is desirable and feasible for trademarks and traditional cultural expressions.
The Māori Advisory Committee is not an isolated experiment. New Zealand extended the advisory committee model to patents (2013) and plant variety rights (2022). The plant variety committee can make binding recommendations in specified circumstances, a step beyond the Māori Advisory Committee’s advisory function. The progression from advisory to partially binding authority across three statutes illustrates a generalisable institutional trajectory: culturally-informed review, first introduced in trademarks, is adopted and strengthened in subsequent IP regimes.
Our findings contribute to two literatures. First, they extend commons governance theory, which asks how shared resources can be governed without privatisation or state control (Ostrom 2010), to IP systems where the state retains formal decision authority. Effective protection from misappropriation is achievable when culturally-informed review is structurally embedded in the registration process, even where formal authority remains with the state. Second, they extend the certification literature (Dranove and Jin 2010, King et al. 2005) by identifying a form of certification that arises endogenously from mandatory screening, without a standalone organisation whose independence and standards must be actively maintained.
As the commercial value of indigenous cultural heritage grows globally, the question policymakers face is not only whether to govern these resources, but how to design institutions that allow cultural review to inform market access without requiring those resources to be withdrawn from the market entirely. New Zealand’s experience suggests that structural embedding of culturally-informed review inside existing IP processes is one viable answer – a floor, not a ceiling, for what indigenous communities may legitimately seek.
Source : VOXeu
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