A political ecology of data

Abstract

Conservationists, governments, and corporations see promise in digital technologies to provide holistic, rapid, and objective information to inform policy, shape investments, and monitor ecosystems. But it is increasingly clear that environmental data does more than simply offer a better view of the planet. This special issue makes a single overarching argument: that we cannot fully understand the current conjuncture in global environmental governance without understanding the platforms, devices, and institutions that comprise environmental data infrastructures. The papers draw together scholarship from political ecology and science and technology studies to demonstrate how data has become a significant site in which contemporary environmental politics are waged and socionatures are materialized. We address: (1) the contested practices of utilizing and maintaining data infrastructures; (2) the ways they are governed and the territorial statecraft they enable; (3) the socionatural materiality they arise within but also produce. The papers in this special issue show that, against its dominant representation, data is material, governed, practiced, and requires praxis. Political ecologists could adopt such an approach to make sense of the emerging ways in which data technologies shape environments and their politics.

Data justice and biodiversity conservation

“…Kitchin and Lauriault ( 2014 ) argue for seeing data as part of complex assemblages, which include not only the data themselves but all the technical, political, and socioeconomic relations shaping data composition, use, and impact. Nost and Goldstein ( 2021 :5) propose the parallel concept of “data infrastructures”––“place‐ and time‐specific networks of funding, standards, rules, technologies and environments [that] structure data…, its organization, analysis, and dissemination, and, ultimately, its use in governing people and nature.” In both conceptualizations, data are not objective truths waiting to be unearthed, but are inextricable from the sociopolitical systems in which they are produced and used (see also Power [ 2004 ] and Cooper [ 2015 ]).…”

“…People and Pixels produced by the National Research Council in 1998). However, concerns over representation, bias, surveillance, and accountability are equally relevant to the use of data in conservation, as indicated by recent and developing bodies of research on the social dimensions of conservation monitoring technologies (Sandbrook et al., 2018 ; Millner, 2020 ; Simlai & Sandbrook, 2021 ) and political ecologies of environmental data (Gabrys, 2016 ; Nost & Goldstein, 2021 ). But conservation research still prioritizes the technical opportunities and challenges of data over the sociopolitical ones.…”

“…The second element of our framework, data control, involves asking who funds data collection, determines the content of the data, and has the power to influence how data are shared and used. In suggesting these questions, we drew from recent work on the political ecology of data (Nost & Goldstein, 2021 ). We were also inspired by work on Indigenous data sovereignty (Kukutai & Taylor, 2016 ), in which Indigenous scholars argue that Indigenous groups should control data about their people and lands.…”

“…Although we organized these questions into five categories, they overlap and interact; that is, the consequences of data are influenced by their composition, the composition of data is influenced by who controls data collection, and so on. And while not repeated throughout the framework, each question could be enhanced by adding and why , a central question in the wider literatures on critical data studies, political ecologies of data, data infrastructures, and data assemblages (Kitchin & Lauriault, 2014; Nost & Goldstein, 2021 ). Asking why encourages conservation researchers to acknowledge and engage with the relationships of power surrounding conservation data.…”

“…But more generally, and most importantly, one needs to understand better the ways in which new data can reinforce or challenge existing inequities (the “matrix of domination” [Vera et al., 2019 ]). Research on conservation monitoring technologies (Millner, 2020 ; Simlai & Sandbrook, 2021 ), the social science of remote sensing (Bennett et al., 2022 ), digital environmental politics (Machen & Nost, 2021 ), and the political ecologies of data (Nost & Goldstein, 2021 ) has begun to engage with these important questions.…”