The design and use of environmental data infrastructures, including software platforms, sensors, satellite data, mobile phone apps, and digitally generated visual representations, is increasingly inseparable from contemporary environmental governance. Such technologies are often intended to enable data transparency, which in turn is assumed to promote expanded participation in democratic governance. In this article, we investigate how environmental monitoring, as performed through domestic and globalized infrastructures that seek to make digital environmental data open and transparent, is playing out in Myanmar’s forest sector. New data infrastructures are inseparable from the proliferation of non-state actors involved in environmental governance amid the country’s transition from military surveillance state toward more liberal and democratic rule, yet participation is not universal. We argue that actors engage new platforms and tools based on different understandings of the role of increased data transparency in environmental governance, which in turn are structured by historical relations with and within the legacy of the surveillance state.
This paper draws upon twelve months of activist research to examine Myanmar's female farmer on the land and in the law. For rural women, the female farmer was an anomaly with emancipatory implications, one associated with a particular material conditions, social relations, and attitudes. In contrast, the female farmer in the National Land Use Policy text was a rightsbearing legal subject produced by a set of negotiations in which individuals acting as experts 'rendered technical' (Li 2007) distinct ontologies of land, law, and gender. Examining the production of and relationship between these representations helps problematize Myanmar's contemporary political transition by providing an ethnographic entry point to chart shifting discourses and subjectivities.
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