From compliance to cultural continuity: Māori non-profit resilience as an exemplar for global reporting

Ellie Norris and Iki Mafi Uele

Meditari Accountancy Research, 2026, vol. 34, issue 7, 295-325

Abstract: PurposeNon-profit organisations (NPOs) face growing pressure to demonstrate resilience amid crises, yet conventional performance reporting frameworks struggle to capture its multidimensional nature. Standard metrics emphasise financial stability but overlook adaptive capacities grounded in cultural values, relationships and collective memories. This study aims to use Māori NPOs as an empirical case to explore how Indigenous approaches to resilience can inform more robust performance measurement globally.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use Manawa Ora, an Indigenous model of resilience that demonstrates how culturally grounded strategies can be integrated into crisis response to analyse the annual reports of 19 Māori non-profit organisations. They then examine He Tauira, a conceptual framework for non-financial reporting launched in late 2025, assessing its potential to capture dimensions of resilience that conventional frameworks overlook.FindingsThe authors analysis reveals how organisations enact and communicate resilience through culturally grounded practices. Māori organisations demonstrate resilience through their commitment to cultural values, mobilising ancestral knowledge and exercising self-determination. These practices challenge Western resilience frameworks that privilege individual leadership and short-term adaptation. He Tauira successfully captures these dimensions, demonstrating how Indigenous-led reporting frameworks can communicate relational, intergenerational and culturally embedded aspects of resilience that standard metrics cannot quantify.Practical implicationsHe Tauira represents the first conceptual framework globally centred on Indigenous values while designed for all entities. Their analysis identifies transferable principles for resilience reporting applicable to any non-profit organisation where performance depends on stakeholder relationships, community embeddedness and long-term commitments rather than solely on financial resources. Indigenous perspectives offer insights to guide developments in performance measurement and reporting for NPOs globally.Originality/valueIndigenous perspectives are missing from extant studies of organisational resilience, yet their analysis reveals how Indigenous perspectives and Indigenous reporting frameworks capture critical relational and intergenerational performance dimensions, contributing to the non-profit organisations’ resilience and accounting literature.

Keywords: Resilience; Non-financial reporting; He Tauira (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eme:medarp:medar-11-2025-3413

DOI: 10.1108/MEDAR-11-2025-3413

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