Toward a political ecology of infrastructure standards: Or, how to think about ships, waterways, sediment, and communities together

Abstract

Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies, we show how global connection is made, maintained, and contested through environmental management practices pegged to infrastructure standards. The Panama Canal expansion, completed in 2016, is a revealing illustration. The expansion has established the New Panamax shipping standard: the maximum allowable dimensions for vessels passing through the canal’s massive new locks. The standard has become a benchmark for port modernization and channel deepening projects along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States and beyond. Because the maximum underwater depth, or draft, of ships transiting the new locks is much deeper than before (50 rather than 39.5 feet), geographically dispersed governments, firms, and port authorities have scrambled to reach that standard in hopes of attracting New Panamax ships and associated revenue streams. As this case shows, global transportation depends on the expensive, ecologically destabilizing, and often-contested practices of dredging and disposing of large volumes of sediment and organic matter. By showing how shipping networks and situated politics converge around infrastructure standards, we foreground the uneven environmental burdens and benefits of transportation.

Infrastructure's Expenditures: Changi Airport, Food Cargo and Capital's Technosphere

“…These insights are especially timely for the present era. They foster an awareness of how and why capital is increasingly investing in transnational infrastructures and committing to onerous resource expenditures on them across the planet (Carse and Lewis, ). While this article's focus is on one type of infrastructure, one can extrapolate its lessons to numerous other infrastructural investments—particularly large‐scale mobility systems—that have lately proliferated the world, including high‐speed rail projects, port investments, and transcontinental links.…”

“…These contingent ‘material processes and throughputs embodied in and metabolized by fixed capital formation’ are what empower capital to move, switch locations and resolve its internal crises (Ekers and Prudham, : 18). Carse and Lewis's () research on transcontinental shipping offers an example of such socioecological fixes. Examining the role of standardization in container shipping, their work uncovers the pertinence of installing uniform landscapes across the world, and consequently activating various input–output exchanges such as riverbed dredging and sediment deposition, for maritime transport to thrive as a global circulation system.…”

“…While previous procedures made use of ‘passive cooling’ (i.e. preserving food using salt, ice and insulation—a method used in the tropics for centuries), current practices at Changi have seen operations become more temperature‐discriminating and energy‐intensive, so as to reach an HACCP‐compliant ‘standard’ that would make the airport amenable to global food flows (Carse and Lewis, ). Framed as such, the building of infrastructures is not simply to benefit Singapore's local/urban lifestyles.…”

Hidden carbon costs of the “everywhere war”: Logistics, geopolitical ecology, and the carbon boot‐print of the US military

“…Global supply chains and institutional logistics, as well as the organised spaces produced by corporate managerial logics and techniques, have lately come under critical scrutiny in a move to interrogate the material infrastructure of global capitalism (Bonacich & Wilson, ; LeCavalier, ; Neilson, ; Toscano & Kinkle, ). However, with few notable exceptions (Cowen, ; Crampton et al., ; Gregory, ; Khalili, ), there has been relatively little written on the role of supply chains in contemporary US military practices, not to mention the role of supply chains in contributing to climate change more generally (Bergmann, ; Bergmann & Holmberg, ; Carse & Lewis, ). This is surprising given that, from a historical perspective, logistics and supply chains, as a way of organising the movement of goods and services, are fundamentally a military technology.…”

Infrastructure and the environment in the Anthropocene

“…The challenges and opportunities of the Anthropocene require the development of new institutions and frameworks that are beyond today's traditional disciplinary structures and reductionist approaches (Allenby & Chester, ). Our current infrastructure institutions compartmentalize knowledge and emphasize disciplinary expertise with a focus on components (Bijker, Hughes, & Pinch, ; Carse & Lewis, ). The Anthropogenic Earth will be characterized by rapidly evolving technologies, human and natural systems, and information access.…”