Supposedly, digitalisation offers new capacities and directions for environmental politics and governance. This chapter critically introduces the discursive trajectories of three ‘developments’, sustainable development, digitalisation and capitalist acceleration. Analytically, the chapter frames these trajectories with sensibilities developed in the sociology of promises, environmental sociology and science and technology studies. To illustrate how subjects and environments are differently (con)figured at the intersection of these trajectories, the chapter attends to two exemplary contexts and asks for each how subjects and environments are (con)figured. I address the contexts of global discourses and local dispositifs of smart cities and of carbon accounting/datafication. The chapter concludes in terms of digitalisation as promissory infrastructural relations that cut across these contexts. This raises avenues for critical environmental politics studies that are sensitive to discourses and dispositifs of greening in relation to recent innovations in analytics that recognise both epistemic/epistemological and ontic/ontological politics. With such attention, interesting problematisations and questions about transformative and conservative potentials emerge.
The connection between Sustainable Development, Environmental Ethics and Environmental Aesthetics is discussed. The historical evolution of the concept “Sustainable Development”, from its foundation on the 1980’s to current days, is analyzed. Then, the ethics of Sustainable Development is characterized on the framework of Environmental Ethics. To conclude, different perspectives of Environmental Aesthetics are considered, and their potential to directly support an environmental ethics and, finally, a sustainable environmental politics, is evaluated.
Chapter 3 focuses centrally on the host of plans and policies for sustainable development conducted in Brazil beginning in the late 1980s, when the concept of sustainable development was introduced into the mainstream of global environmental politics. The chapter also elaborates on the contemporary major players of Amazonian sustainable development politics, focusing on the roles and historical formations of the Catholic Church, social movement groups, and activism in relation to various projects and socio-environmental struggles of the late 1980s and into contemporary times. Illustrative cases of Brazilian infrastructure and developmental priorities for the Amazon are discussed in order to illustrate the primacy of national integration and consolidation of state power—in other words, economic priorities with a strong modernization orientation—well beyond environmental protection and social equity considerations.
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