A political ecology of data

Digital Technologies ◽

Environmental Data ◽

Special Issue ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Data Infrastructures ◽

Dominant Representation

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.

What Does Collaborative Event Ethnography Tell Us About Global Environmental Governance?

10.1162/glep_a_00242 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 125-131 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Rosaleen Duffy

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

International Political Economy ◽

Black Box ◽

Epistemic Communities ◽

Special Issue ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Insight Into

This forum places CEE at COP10 in the context of wider theoretical debates about global environmental governance. This special issue enhances our understanding of governance by examining how ideas travel and develop at meetings before they become the official documents and announcements that are the more common foci of such papers. The articles in this issue of GEP open up the ‘black box’ of decision-making and allow us to gain a better understanding of global environmental governance, in theory and in practice. These articles are firmly in line with International Political Economy approaches, allowing us to reflect on how regulations can mirror and deepen existing global inequalities, revealing the continuing power of epistemic communities, and demonstrating the important role of ideas. The special issue allows us insight into how global conventions work, how alliances are formed, how particular ideas emerge, and crucially, how alternatives are rendered silent and invisible.

Making Influence Visible: Innovating Ethnography at the Paris Climate Summit

10.1162/glep_a_00507 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 19 (2) ◽

pp. 38-60 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Kimberly R. Marion Suiseeya ◽

Laura Zanotti

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

Political Ecology ◽

Indigenous Peoples ◽

Politics Of Representation ◽

Environmental Challenges ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Power And Influence

Although Indigenous Peoples make significant contributions to global environmental governance and were prominent actors at the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, COP21, they remain largely invisible in conventional, mainstream, and academic accounts of COP21. In this article, we adopt feminist collaborative event ethnography to draw attention to often marginalized and unrecognized actors and help make visible processes that are often invisible in the study of power and influence at sites of global environmental governance. Specifically, we integrate current approaches to power from international relations and political ecology scholarship to investigate how Indigenous Peoples, critical actors for solving global environmental challenges, access, navigate, and cultivate power at COP21 to shape global environmental governance. Through conceptual and methodological innovations that illuminate how Indigenous Peoples overcome structural and spatial barriers to engagement, this article demonstrates how attention to the politics of representation through pluralistic approaches to power can help expand the repertoire of possibilities for advancing global environmental governance.

Studying Global Environmental Meetings to Understand Global Environmental Governance: Collaborative Event Ethnography at the Tenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity

10.1162/glep_e_00236 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 14 (3) ◽

pp. 1-20 ◽

Cited By ~ 48

Author(s):

Lisa M. Campbell ◽

Catherine Corson ◽

Noella J. Gray ◽

Kenneth I. MacDonald ◽

J. Peter Brosius

Keyword(s):

Biodiversity Conservation ◽

Biological Diversity ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

Convention On Biological Diversity ◽

Special Issue ◽

Research Practices ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Over Time

This special issue introduces readers to collaborative event ethnography (CEE), a method developed to support the ethnographic study of large global environmental meetings. CEE was applied by a group of seventeen researchers at the Tenth Conference of the Parties (COP10) to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) to study the politics of biodiversity conservation. In this introduction, we describe our interests in global environmental meetings as sites where the politics of biodiversity conservation can be observed and as windows into broader governance networks. We specify the types of politics we attend to when observing such meetings and then describe the CBD, its COP, challenges meetings pose for ethnographic researchers, how CEE responds to these challenges generally, and the specifics of our research practices at COP10. Following a summary of the contributed papers, we conclude by reflecting on the evolution of CEE over time.

Doing feminist collaborative event ethnography

Journal of Political Ecology ◽

10.2458/v27i1.23104 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 27 (1) ◽

pp. 961-987

Author(s):

Laura Zanotti ◽

Kimberly Marion Suiseeya

Keyword(s):

Political Ecology ◽

Environmental Science ◽

Environmental Conflict ◽

Environmental Knowledge ◽

Feminist Political Ecology ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Research Designs ◽

Ecological Practice

Feminist political ecologists have transformed mainstream political ecology since its inception. The foundational and current work of feminist political ecologists indicate that their field is attentive to the epistemological foundations of power, inequities, and inequalities that cut across intersectional identities and hierarchies of difference and at the sites of environmental conflict and governance. Feminist political ecologists have made important theoretical interventions in the interdisciplinary community of political ecologists, but the use of feminist methodologies and 'team-based environmental science' can be expanded. We argue that revisiting feminist methodological commitments is critical for furthering how feminist political ecology examines how, and in what way, power and privilege operate in the contexts where environmental knowledge is produced. We make our argument by drawing upon a multi-year, multi-sited project to describe how collaborative event ethnography (CEE) offers many possibilities to reassess feminist political ecology research designs. We show how the recognition of diverse and plural epistemologies are foundational preconditions to integrating feminist principles in feminist political ecology research. We find that integrating reflexivity, responsibility, and co-production in research designs create opportunities for, and challenges to, carrying out feminist political ecological practice. In so doing, the integration of feminist methodologies are critical to disrupting knowledge hegemonies and providing new modes of practicing feminist political ecologies.Keywords: Collaborative event ethnography, feminist political ecology, feminist methodologies, global environmental governance

Introduction: The Institutional Fragmentation of Global Environmental Governance: Causes, Consequences, and Responses

10.1162/glep_a_00180 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 1-13 ◽

Cited By ~ 114

Author(s):

Fariborz Zelli ◽

Harro van Asselt

Keyword(s):

International Relations ◽

Biological Diversity ◽

Special Issue ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Research Themes ◽

Private And Public ◽

Governance Architecture ◽

Institutional Fragmentation

This article introduces a special issue on the expanding research agenda on institutional fragmentation. The term refers to the growing diversity and challenges to coordination among private and public norms, treaties, and organizations that address a given issue area of international politics. International relations scholars increasingly address this phenomenon, framing it with alternative concepts like regime complexes or polycentricity. A considerable part of the existing debate remains focused on whether a centralized or polycentric governance architecture is preferable. Instead, as this special issue shows, domains of global environmental governance—like climate change, biological diversity, renewable energy, and forestry—are already fragmented. It is time to address new, more pertinent questions and help advance institutionalist research on this phenomenon. We introduce four major research themes for analyzing the fragmentation of different domains of global environmental governance: taking stock, causes, consequences, and responses.

Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: A Coming of Age?

10.1162/glep_e_00011 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 1-9 ◽

Cited By ~ 76

Keyword(s):

Environmental Performance ◽

Coming Of Age ◽

Special Issue ◽

Introductory Article ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Sustainability Governance

This introductory article draws on the contributions to this special issue to consider the implications of a transparency turn in global environmental and sustainability governance. Three interrelated aspects are addressed: why transparency now? How is transparency being institutionalized? And what effects does it have? In analyzing the spread of transparency in governance, the article highlights the broader (contested) normative context that shapes both its embrace by various actors and its institutionalization. I argue that the effects of transparency—whether it informs, empowers or improves environmental performance—remain uneven, with transparency falling short of meeting the ends many anticipate from it. Nonetheless, as the contributions to this issue make clear, transparency has indeed come of age as a defining feature of our current and future politics.