Reworking the political in digital forests: The cosmopolitics of socio-technical worlds

Abstract

Forests are increasingly central to policies and initiatives to address global environmental change. Digital technologies have become crucial components of these projects as the tools and systems that would monitor and manage forests for storing carbon, preserving biodiversity, and providing ecosystem services. Historically, technologies have been instrumental in forming forests as spaces of conservation, extraction, and inhabitation. Digital technologies build on previous techniques of forest management, which have been shaped by colonial governance, expert science, and economic growth. However, digital technologies for achieving environmental initiatives can also extend, transform, and disrupt these sedimented practices. This article asks how the convergence of forests and digital technologies gives rise to different socio-technical formations and modalities of “political forests.” Through an analysis of five digital operations, including 1) observation, 2) datafication, 3) participation, 4) automation, and 5) regulation and transformation, we investigate how the co-constitution of forests, technologies, subjects, and social life creates distinct materializations of politics–and cosmopolitics. By building on and expanding the concept of cosmopolitics, we query how the political is designated through digital forest projects and how it might be reworked to generate less extractive environmental practices and relations while contributing to more just and pluralistic forest worlds.

Between monitoring and surveillance: Geographies of emerging drone technologies in contemporary conservation

“…The regulation of nonhuman environments is increasingly digitised, following wider trends in technological innovation (Gabrys et al 2022; Goldstein and Nost 2022, 59). Social scientists question the authority transferred to digital technologies, as devices like drones take on new roles in ‘automated’ decision-making pathways – a process that Adams (2019) terms ‘algorithmic’ governance.…”

“…One thing that is clear within our analysis is that the use of drones as part of surveillance infrastructures is especially relevant in what we may call ‘state’ landscapes: productions of more-than-human ecologies in which conservation plays a primarily disciplinary or biopolitical role (Peluso and Vandergeest 2011). State forests are primarily administrative entities, which function to legitimise some visions and actors over others, while extending state powers to organise and regulate populations (Gabrys et al 2022). This administrative organising is articulated with environmental scientific knowledge, especially forestry engineering, to calculate and measure the amount of forest and give it a monetizable value that again justifies the counterinsurgency advance to remove the armed groups in the area (Peluso 1991).…”

“…Here we might also want to think about the wider transformation of environmental governance more generally via Smart Earth technologies and Smart Forest technologies – environmental monitoring through remote sensing, advanced ICTs, etc. – that enact extractive, green capitalism, while presenting as neutral (Gabrys et al 2022). What is significant about such digital ecologies is not only how they participate in rendering environments visible in terms of elements like carbon (and its productive potentials) to the exclusion of other relationships, but also how they render invisible the ways that people participate in making this data through observations, suggestions, and interpretations (Johnson, Strawhacker and Pulsifer 2022).…”

Keeping time with digital technologies: From real-time environments to forest futurisms

“…Digital operations and practices facilitating the datafication, automation and optimisation of forest environments produce temporalities oriented around newness, liveness, linearity, accumulation, simultaneity, and efficiency (Gabrys et al, 2022). In this context, the real-time has emerged as a technological and temporal paradigm for smart environmental monitoring and regulation (Bakker and Ritts, 2018;Gabrys, 2016 ).…”

Taking data science into the forest

“…Data practices and data sciences then contribute to different social-political effects, depending upon who is involved in using digital technologies, generating data, and acting on evidence. As the Smart Forests research project has demonstrated, power inequalities can arise across actors such as big tech companies in the Global North and forest communities in the Global South, or across environmental policymakers and commercial tech firms with different objectives and commitments to addressing environmental change (Gabrys et al 2022). The "datafication" of forest environments involves selecting, mobilising, and sustaining particular forest worlds, which can come at the expense of others.…”