Imagining Impact in Global Supply Chains: Data-Driven Sustainability and the Production of Surveillable Space

Abstract

In the context of global agrocommodity supply chains, the sociotechnical imaginary of neoliberal sustainability is characterized by a belief that the impactfulness of market-based solutions like fair trade standards and voluntary certification schemes relies on the transparency and traceability of those supply chains. Achieving transparency and traceability, however, relies on the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data about numerous social, environmental, and economic factors, data that are generated through increasingly intensive regimes of high-tech monitoring and surveillance. For my interlocutors, who work to design and promote these standards, surveillance comes to be seen as not only justified but also expected and necessary, leading to the tacit categorization of certain spaces (and the human and non-human actors who populate them) as surveillable. In the case of sustainability standards specifically, which are imposed almost exclusively on producers in the Global South, the notion of surveillable space raises important questions about race and gender.

Governing through ESG and the green spirit of asset manager capitalism

“…I have reproduced a fairly long snippet of this conversation in order to give a better sense of the tentative nature of ESG integration and the relatively informal interactions in which ESG concerns are elaborated and negotiated both internally within Norebank but also between portfolio managers and invested companies. The kinds of ESG-mediated interactions Sara and Peter describe—small, casual meetings with both other investors and the managers of invested companies—are at odds with the objective, impersonal “data-driven imaginary” that characterizes the ideal-typical sustainability initiative (Archer, 2021). But they are also at odds with emergent theories of asset manager capitalism, which paint a picture of asset managers who are disinterested in the performance of individual firms.…”

“…Norebank's portfolio managers were no different, and they compared European executive salaries to American executive salaries several times in interviews, perhaps because I am originally from the United States. As I have argued elsewhere, framing executive pay as a governance issue through the lens of ESG analysis allowed my informants to relocate the (im)morality of executive pay from their own subjectivity to a moral subjectivity of the market itself-the former, a subjectivity rooted in individual opinions and cultural specificities; the latter, a subjectivity rooted in the economics of efficiency and optimality (Archer, 2021).…”

Surveillance Systems for Sustainable Fisheries: Perceptions on the Adoption of Electronic Monitoring in the Northeast US Multispecies Fishery

“…The use of EM data could be empowering, but it may also reinforce existing power dynamics and motivations if fishers perceive EM data as improperly interpreted or utilized in order to implement new restrictions on fishers. Archer (2021) refers to "surveillable spaces" as consisting of the surveilled, the surveillors, surveillance technologies, and the "standardizers" who ultimately establish the rules and norms of these surveillance-brokered relationships. In the case of the NEGF, several organizations serve as standardizers, including environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs), federal science and regulatory agencies, and academic research institutions.…”

Traceability

“…This is particularly true to the extent that decisions based on the analysis of data stored on blockchains have to be explained to affected stakeholders. Through an analysis of sustainability standards in the tea supply chain, Archer (2021) shows how the purported immutability of 'Big Data' stored on blockchains can be invoked to explain and therefore justify decisions that might otherwise seem unjust. Some sustainability standards stipulate that even household crops cannot be planted within a certain distance of rivers, a space known as a riparian zone, even though many smallholder farmers rely on this land for subsistence agriculture.…”