Infrastructures of environmental governance |
| |
| Authors: | Peter Taber |
| |
| Affiliation: | Sociocultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Fellow in Informatics with the US Department of Veterans Affairs. His research in Ecuador examines the institutionalization of ‘the environment’ as a technopolitical problem in that country, with a special emphasis on the politics of biodiversity. |
| |
| Abstract: | To the extent that environmental governance aspires to be based on positive knowledge of what ‘the environment’ consists of and how it functions, programmes of environmental management must find ways to study it. This article draws on scholarship on knowledge infrastructures to examine a trajectory of scientific work in Ecuador focused on biodiversity and the recent uptake of this infrastructure for the study of climate change. When combined with an appreciation for the character of power and knowledge in modern institutions, analyses of experts’ ‘infrastructure work’ elucidate how environmental problems take shape as objects of expert intervention at the level of concrete, technical practices. Incorporating scientific infrastructure within the ambit of environmental anthropology can help us to understand the shape of environmental politics to come. |
| |
| Keywords: | |
|
|
