About the Initiative
Environmental governance is a way of understanding who’s involved in environmental decision-making, how environmental problems are framed and assessed, and what actions are ultimately taken. Digital technologies are increasingly being used within environmental governance and are seen as a powerful tool for addressing the dual crises of environmental degradation and climate change.
Beginning in 2017 and formed through a partnership between CLEE, the Environmental Law Institute, and Yale University, our initiative catalyzed and disseminated multidisciplinary research on the environmental impacts of digitalization.
Digital Environmental Governance: An Interview Series
One of CLEE’s priorities in this initiative has been to study the implications of digitalization for environmental governance. Environmental governance is a way of understanding who’s involved in environmental decision-making, how environmental problems are framed and assessed, and what actions are ultimately taken. Digital technologies are increasingly being used within environmental governance and are seen as a powerful tool for addressing the dual crises of environmental degradation and climate change.
Aidan Smith, former Research Fellow at the Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment, explores the effects of digitalization on environmental governance through three interviews with social scientists. These interviews tease out important considerations, insights, and questions for policy-makers, decision-makers, and the public when it comes to deploying digital technologies for environmental governance. To learn more about this work, check out the interviews below:
Predictive Policing, Environmental Governance, and the Spatial Monitoring and Reporting Tool
In this interview, 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.
The summary article of the interview, titled, “Digitalization and Predictive Policing in Conservation: Does technology shift focus toward ‘green policing’ and away from integrated conservation and development?” can be read on Legal Planet: https://bit.ly/3WXTprZ
Precision Agriculture and the Costs of Inaccuracy
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.
The summary article of the interview, titled, “The Farm is Not an Algorithm: The inaccuracies of precision agriculture carry socio-environmental risks and produce inequalities,” can be read on Legal Planet: https://bit.ly/3N6Cmj8
Sustainability Assurance and the Programming of Environmental Governance
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.
The summary article of the interview, titled, “Technology’s Role in Governing Sustainable Food Systems: Digitalization is altering how we understand the environment and act upon issues of sustainability,” can be read on Legal Planet: https://bit.ly/technology-governing-f…
Support for this work was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Learn more about the Network for the Digital Economy and the Environment. You can also follow the Network on Twitter at @networkDigEE or on LinkedIn.