Digital Environmental Governance – Interview Series

Sake Kruk shares his research on how digital technologies are increasingly being used to assure sustainable food production. We explore how technology shapes the ways environmental issues are framed from the outset, how specific sustainability objectives are set, and the types of interventions and actions that are promoted. He lays out a series of questions that policy-makers, decision-makers, and the public should ask whenever digital technologies are deployed for environmental governance.

Oane Visser discusses his research on precision agriculture, i.e. the use of digital tools and algorithms within agriculture. Among other things, we talk about the techno-utopian thinking that undergirds precision agriculture, why technologies may be inaccurate “in the wild,” power dynamics and struggles between different actors, the inequalities that digital technologies can produce, and social movements that seek to promote more just and equitable forms of digital environmental governance within agriculture. 

James Stinson shares his research concerning the effects of digitalization on conservation and environmental governance in Belize. He discusses a growing trend toward predictive policing of parks and protected areas, a shift in what conservation fundamentally is and means, struggles over conservation data, the actors pushing this digital transformation, and the standardization of conservation approaches.Summary Article: “Digitalization and Predictive Policing in Conservation: Does technology shift focus toward ‘green policing’ and away from integrated conservation and development?”