Fusion power plant designs based on magnetic confinement, such as the tokamak design, offer a promising route to sustainable fusion power but require robust exhaust solutions capable of tolerating intense heat and particle fluxes from the plasma to material surfaces. Turbulent plasma transport in the divertor volume – the region where the plasma-material interface is handled – is poorly understood yet impacts several key factors affecting device performance. In this letter a comprehensive study of the underlying drive and characteristics of turbulence in the divertor volume of the MAST device is presented, using a synergy of advanced high speed video data analysis and high fidelity non-linear simulations. Whilst the characterstics of divertor turbulence are shown to be largly universal for MAST, the diagnosed drives of the turbulence are strongly dependant the geometry of the divertor – a potentially important result as the community looks to advanced divertor designs with complex geometry for future power plants. These results lay the foundations of a first-principles physics basis for radial transport in the tokamak divertor, providing a critical step towards a predictive understanding of tokamak divertor plasma solutions.