Infrastructuring zoonoses: Zoonoses,infrastructures,and the life giving and taking politics of pandemic prevention

Abstract

This article critically reviews geographical scholarship to develop five categories for conceptualising the plurality of zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. These are infrastructures that (1) unmoor zoonoses, (2) mobilise zoonoses, (3) immobilise zoonoses, (4) leak zoonoses, and (5) surveil zoonoses. Our analysis of these categories complicates notions that infrastructure either spreads or stops zoonoses and reveals the varied bio- and necro-politics associated with zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure. Before concluding, we review principles of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise to help mobilise geographical scholarship in support of anti-anthropocentric, care-full, and probiotic approaches to modulating zoonoses in the (post)pandemic era.

I Introduction

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, pangolins occupied the limelight as a potential source of the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, behind the outbreak. SARS-CoV-2-related strains were reportedly identified in tissue samples from pangolins before and after the pandemic began (Choo et al., 2020). Although this link was eventually challenged (Frutos et al., 2020), calls persisted to crackdown on the trade of the world’s most trafficked mammal. Significant resources have since been directed at disrupting pangolin trade, including new investments in mapping and surveilling transport infrastructure routes used in the illegal trade, with the aim of intercepting shipments at ports (Tinsman et al., 2023). Genomic data infrastructure is also being designed to trace supply chains when wildlife products are intercepted, supporting reactive enforcement at the point of origin (Tinsman et al., 2023).

It is not only infrastructure related to illegal wildlife trade that has come under scrutiny following the COVID-19 pandemic. A whole new era of infrastructural pandemic-proofing has begun, with businesses and governments retrofitting, repurposing, and redesigning infrastructure for infection control and pandemic resilience. For example, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons has committed to redeveloping its entire national animal health infrastructure to prevent and reduce endemic diseases and conditions that present risks for livestock and humans to improve national biosecurity (HoC, 2022); while the United States Department of Agriculture announced large-scale investments in infrastructure to improve integrated zoonotic disease monitoring and surveillance nationally, regionally, and globally (USDA 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into stark relief the links between infrastructure and zoonoses.

Prior to the pandemic, infrastructure was already front and centre in geographical scholarship, reflecting a global turn to infrastructure in policy and practice (Dodson 2017). Within this scholarship, infrastructure is defined as configurations of material objects that (dis)allow flows of goods and materials, information, and people and mediate and produce relations between things (Bowker 1994; Larkin 2013; Star 1999; Star and Ruhleder 1996; Wakefield 2018). Material infrastructures enable and enhance human living but also exist relationally, built for certain people, certain purposes, and certain futures (Kanoi et al., 2022, 1). In recent decades, trillions of dollars have been invested globally in upgrading and extending built infrastructures, including fibre optic cables and power lines, pipelines, (air)ports, railways, and roads (Bersaglio et al., 2021). Geographers have demonstrated how these investments are creating new material realities, as they reorganise territory (Brenner and Ghosh 2022; Elden 2010; Schindler and Kanai, 2021; Vasudevan 2015), extend uneven political economies (Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Furlong 2020; Lesutis 2022; Strauss 2020), and reconfigure ecosystems and more-than-human relations (Enns and Sneyd 2020; Barua 2021; Nelson and Bigger, 2022). Across this work, the role of infrastructure in reproducing colonial, gendered, and racialised inequalities and power relations has also been made clear (Cowen, 2014; Enns and Bersaglio 2020; Siemiatycki et al., 2020; Strauss 2020).

Now, the global infrastructure turn is converging with a zoonotic pandemic era. A growing body of research seeks to understand the role of infrastructure in the spread of infections and disease. This expanding body of largely apolitical, technical work attempts to predict which viruses might be released by new mega-infrastructure projects, to model how diseases spread through infrastructure networks, and to identify the best infrastructure for lowering the risk of zoonotic disease outbreaks (Connolly et al., 2020). Technocratic policy responses emanate from work orientated around predicting, controlling, and surveilling the movement of humans and nonhumans, including microbes, to prevent future pandemics (Lakoff 2015; Leach et al., 2021). From quarantine zones to biosurveillance to diagnostic laboratories, infrastructural interventions are framed as paramount to pandemic-proofing our future.

The idea that infrastructure can either fail us by spreading zoonoses or save us by containing zoonoses – predominant in public health, biomedical, and biology thinking – risks missing out on the far more diverse relationships that may exist between infrastructure and zoonoses. Within geography, critical engagement with relational ontologies of both infrastructure and disease help deepen and nuance this understanding. As Cusworth and Lorimer suggest, pathogenesis ‘takes root’ through complex and networked interactions, rather than singular events (2023, 462; Hinchliffe et al., 2013, 2016). Hence, it may be more productive to think of infrastructure as a zoonotic borderland rather than borderline (Hinchliffe et al., 2013) where humans, animals, and microbes interact with the potential for a plurality of outcomes.

In this article, we develop five categories to help trace how infrastructures (dis)assemble and (re)order human-animal-microbe relations, configuring different zoonotic disease situations in the process. By analysing and discussing these categories, we respond to the questions: How does infrastructure make and unmake zoonotic disease situations – or, situations where microbes can turn into pathogens (Hinchcliffe et al., 2016, 53)? What are the implications of human-animal-microbe configurations enabled through infrastructure, and how are they differentially experienced by human and nonhuman populations? And, what infrastructural interventions should we aspire to in a zoonotic pandemic era? Our aim is to leverage geographical scholarship on infrastructure into a more nuanced understanding of, first, the relationship between infrastructure and zoonoses and, second, the varied politics arising from the disease situations animated by different types of infrastructure.

To start, through a review of existing literature and with reference to our own research context, we categorise five ways that infrastructures may configure zoonotic disease situations. These categories include infrastructures that (1) unmoor zoonoses, (2) circulate zoonoses, (3) immobilise zoonoses, (4) leak zoonoses, and (5) surveil zoonoses. We approach these categories as heuristic devices, recognising that in reality most infrastructures will combine different elements of each category and change over time. This discussion also reveals the bio- and necro-politics that cut across the continuum of relationships between infrastructure and zoonoses. We unpack these politics further in Section 3, where we define bio- and necro- politics and explain how the management of zoonoses through infrastructure is always fraught with life and death politics (Ahuja 2016; Gandy 2022; Nemser 2017). Before concluding, we speak to principles and possibilities associated with infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise through anti-anthropocentric, care-full, and probiotic infrastructures (Cusworth and Lorimer, 2023, 466).

II Infrastructure and zoonoses

Zoonosis – from the Greek, zoon (animals) and nosos (disease) – can be any type of virus, bacterium, parasite, fungus, or prion able to cross from animal species to humans (Sodikoff 2017). When a zoonotic microbe enters and colonises a human or nonhuman body – commonly referred to as spillover (Kenney et al., 2021) – the body becomes infected. This can happen through contact with a natural reservoir, an intermediate animal host, a vector, bodily fluid, or other lively environments, such as soil, as in the case of anthrax. Infections can be maintained in a body with no obvious clinical signs or can lead to clinical signs at which point the body has a zoonotic disease. Disease, which may only be experienced by a minority of those infected, occurs when there are signs and symptoms of illness. Disease can be endemic, constantly present in a population with relatively low spread, or sudden outbreaks can occur, leading to epidemics or even pandemics.

Conventional thought is that bodies and populations can be kept free of zoonotic disease if they are protected against potentially hazardous life, resulting in interventions aimed at policing and repelling potential breaches that might compromise public health (Hinchliffe et al., 2013; Dzingirai et al., 2017a; Lorimer 2020; Cusworth and Lorimer, 2023). This view reflects ontological adherence to the false binary – and separation – of nature-society predominant in colonial/European/modern/western philosophy (Lorimer 2020). Relational disease ontology complicates such understandings of zoonoses, suggesting that everyday encounters between humans and nonhumans are neither intrinsically healthy or unhealthy, but are instead ‘contributors to the becoming or retraction of health’ (Andrews 2019, 1113). In this section, we describe how infrastructures produce different human-animal-microbe configurations that, in turn, contribute to the becoming or retraction of zoonoses.

1 Infrastructures that unmoor zoonoses

The recent infrastructure scramble – driven by a rush to integrate rural land and natural resources into national territory and cross-border networks (Kanoi and Schindler, 2022) – has the potential to unmoor zoonotic microbes that may have not previously circulated widely (Brenner and Ghosh 2022). Here, we understand unmooring as the act of untethering something from a particular place, population, or pre-existing disease situation. For instance, there are concerns that arctic ice and permafrost could serve as a potential pathogen reservoir and that transport infrastructure development alongside climate change could release dormant microbes from across arctic regions (Christie, 2021; Waits et al., 2018).

Beyond unmooring microbes, new built infrastructures reconfigure ‘topological landscapes of embeddings and disembeddings’ (Hinchcliffe et al., 2013, 538). The mechanisms responsible for this are multiple. For example, the expansion of road and highway networks can accelerate the degradation of forests and decimation of habitats, as land is cleared and converted for other uses over vast distances (Asher et al., 2020). New transport networks may also coincide with the expansion of commercial agriculture, extractive and other industries, processing facilities and logistics hubs, and tourism within demarcated areas along transport routes (Bersaglio et al., 2021). Alongside increased flows of animals, goods, people, and raw materials, these processes can alter the nature and intensity of relationships between humans, domestic and wild animals, and microbes at scale, creating new opportunities for pathogen (re)emergence and infection (Hinchcliffe and Lavau, 2013; Brenner and Ghosh 2022).

Peri- and sub-urban spaces undergoing infrastructural change represent ideal scenarios for microbes to be unmoored, as they tend to include high density informal settlements undergoing rapid socio-ecological transformation (Ali et al., 2022; Connolly 2020; Connolly et al., 2020; Gandy 2022). This is exemplified by recent outbreaks of Ebola in western Africa. The first urban Ebola outbreaks happened nearly 40 years after rural outbreaks began (Connolly et al., 2020). Accordingly, Ebola was nothing new to western Africa when devastating outbreaks took place between 2013 and 2016, as the virus was already circulating locally as an endemic disease in human populations (Fairhead et al., 2021). However, the growth of peri-urban areas along major transport routes led to settlement in formerly forested areas on the fringes of larger towns and new commercial agricultural activities (Dzingirai et al., 2017b). The combination of rapid population growth – a factor in the spread of disease (Coker et al., 2011) – and reconfigured multispecies interactions along expanding transport networks likely contributed to unmooring the virus from rural areas.

2 Infrastructures that circulate zoonoses

Critical shifts in the mobility of people, goods, and capital over the last two centuries have also enabled zoonotic microbes to circulate faster and farther than ever before. As Hinchliffe et al. write, ‘The promiscuity of human and nonhuman lives, their mixing, movement and codependencies, [seem] to drive a continuous “spillover” (Quamenn, 2012), where microbes that were once restricted to nonhuman species were able to transmute and transmit to people’ (2016, 6). Changing climates, which makes it possible for vector-borne zoonoses to reach and survive in new places (Morse, 1993; Daszak et al., 2001; Slingenbergh et al., 2004), are further contributing to the direction, reach, and speed of microbial traffic (Nading 2014).

Already violent processes of colonisation and slavery played a profound and pervasive role in accelerating the movement of humans, animals, and microbes, as colonial conquest and trade altered patterns of mobility and contact (Faleye 2018; Baker et al., 2022). During this period, transport infrastructure, including roads, railways, and ports, were built and upgraded to enable the violent extraction and movement of materials, bodies, and capital around the world (Pasternak, 2023). As goods and populations circulated along these routes, zoonotic microbes moved as well. In containers, cargo holds, and train carriages, people and animals were forced into close proximity and contact for long periods of time, affording zoonotic pathogens greater opportunities to jump between animals and humans (Sodikoff 2019).

For example, the bubonic plague predated colonialism; however, it was not until the colonial era that it took hold of the world at a global scale (Bigon 2016; Sodikoff 2019). Rats harbouring fleas that vectored pathogens would stowaway on ships and train cars, feeding on grain and other food stores, as they were transported to and from colonies all around the world. Eventually, infected rats would die of the disease, leaving fleas to seek out other hosts, such as humans. Once the link was made between fleas and rats, efforts were made to prevent outbreaks onboard vessels by using cats to hunt rats; however, rats proved adept at using deep hiding spaces in ships to thwart feline ratters (Sodikoff 2019, 102). By the end of the nineteenth century, the plague had spread to every continent, as infected rats and humans would arrive in ports and infect other humans and nonhumans (Echenberg 2002).

Today, zoonotic microbes continue to travel as they did in the past, hitchhiking along routes built to facilitate the movement of global capital (Lunstrum et al., 2021). The routes they travel are often relics of the colonial past, but new modalities of transport enable speeds of travel faster than previous eras, making outbreaks incredibly difficult to control or reign-in. The total number of airline passengers travelling each year grew from virtually nil in the 1930s to more than four billion in 2019 (Baker et al., 2022). The expansion of global air travel networks has played a key role in the global spread of multiple recent zoonotic epidemics and pandemics, including the 2003 SARS coronavirus outbreak (Lam et al., 2003); the 2009 swine flu outbreak (Apolloni et al., 2013); the 2012 MERS coronavirus outbreak (Gardner et al., 2016); and SARS-CoV-2 (Tayoun et al., 2020). Increased investment in other modalities of infrastructure – from high-speed railway to urban transport systems – have similarly transformed the speed and spread of zoonotic pathogens, impacting the ability of authorities to respond when outbreaks occur (Vojnovic et al., 2019; Heymann and Shindo, 2020; Connolly et al., 2020).

Much like the past, infrastructural space remains a site of intense contact between human and nonhuman bodies, as nonhumans continue to be entangled in and exploited through global systems of production. As sectors reliant on nonhuman bodies, such as meat production, industrialise, the space between different species is reduced, creating more opportunities for viral mutation and spillover (Lunstrum et al., 2021). Through the global trade in live animals, including (exotic) pets, some animals travel great distances while being subjected to stressors that make them vulnerable to disease, including starvation, ship motion, ammonia, heat stress, high stocking density, unhygienic environments, and mixing of animals (Broom 2003; Smith et al., 2017).

Although geographical scholarship is only just beginning to attend to the more-than-human nature/s of infrastructure (Barua 2021; Doherty 2019; Enns and Snyed, 2020; Wakefield and Braun 2019), infrastructure’s circulatory effects have always extended to nonhumans. As Barua writes, ‘transport infrastructures and engineering works set in motion a cascade of other-than-human mobilities that in turn [have] significant bearings on ecology, populations and health’ (2021, 1471). As human and nonhuman bodies meet and circulate along new and upgraded infrastructure routes – confined in vehicles together or in other temporarily permanent geographies of holding and waiting during transit – diverse human-animal-microbe configurations unfold with the potential for pathogenesis.

3 Infrastructures that immobilise zoonoses

As much as infrastructures can produce novel configurations of human-animal-microbe interaction that facilitate zoonotic outbreaks, they can also be used to manage and mediate these interactions. Just as it is today, infrastructure has long been viewed as essential for immobilising zoonoses. Fences and quarantine facilities have been built with the aim of keeping animals perceived to be infected or risky separate from non-infected animals. Cattle dips and spray races have been used to help prevent infection and disease. Water, sanitation, and hygiene infrastructures have helped to ensure that animal waste and bodily fluids are disposed of, reducing the risk of infection (Paulsen et al., 2011). Used to manage zoonotic diseases among domestic and wildlife populations – including protecting both from each other – these technologies embody violent logics of eradication and separation in disease management.

However, other types of infrastructure have and continue to be used to immobilise zoonoses. Pastoralists in northern Kenya, where we work, describe long histories of using ecological features in the landscape to manage zoonoses, such as treating forested areas or wetlands that harbour potentially pathogenic microbes as buffer zones or spending time at higher elevations during certain seasons to avoid disease risks for their livestock. Kreike’s concept of ‘environmental infrastructure’ is useful here, as such infrastructures constitute ‘a coproduction of human ingenuity and labor on the one hand and nonhuman actors (animals, insects, microbes, and plants) and forces (physical, chemical) on the other’ (2022, 2).

The use of extensive built infrastructures in an attempt to defend against and control zoonoses expanded alongside extractivist colonial and capitalist projects. As LaDuke and Cowen argue, ‘the expansion and reproduction of settler colonial systems of value are literally, physically, enabled by infrastructure’ (2020, 264). Ecological zones were also often incorporated into colonisers’ built infrastructures of zoonotic disease control. For example, in present-day Zimbabwe, the settler state used so called ‘native ranches’ – demarcated zones for occupation and use by racialised populations and their livestock – as buffer zones to shield white ranches from ‘problem [wild] animals and animal diseases’ (Mavhunga and Spierenburg 2009, 720; Mavhunga and Spierenburg 2007; Mavhunga 2018). Additional infrastructures, such as fences and security systems, were built to help defend and secure land seized under the guise of pest management and infection control.

Namibia’s Veterinary Cordon Fence (i.e. Red Line) is also illustrative of such infrastructure. During the early years of German colonisation, outbreaks of cattle disease were common, with devastating effects on livestock production. To protect settler herds from epidemics, a fence was built from Namibia’s Atlantic Coastline to its shared border with Botswana. The fence was meant to control livestock movement, but the boundary – printed as a red line on maps – segregated Indigenous populations in the north from white settlement areas to the south (Miescher 2012; Koot and Hitchcock 2019). The Red Line remains in place today, despite calls to remove it, claiming to protect livestock south of the fence from diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease and bovine pleuropneumonia. This makes it easier for farmers in southern Namibia to export meat while denying the same advantages to livestock herders in the north (Koot and Hitchcock 2019). That infrastructures like this are still in place today, despite the existence of far less exclusionary ways of managing and mitigate against zoonoses, extends Nemser’s argument that ‘infrastructural pasts weigh like a nightmare on the circulation of the present’ (2017, 20) to zoonotic disease configurations as well.

Many infrastructural interventions used to control zoonoses are premised on colonial and racialised framings of local communities and Indigenous people ‘as closer to nature and thus more likely to be in contact with pathogenic animals or substances’ (da Silva, 2023, 313). This framing has been used to justify interventions that segregate different types of bodies, invoking violence on medical grounds (Swanson 1977). For example, in Uganda, ‘unhealthy environments’ containing tsetse fly were closed and forcefully depopulated, with homes and fields destroyed as part of a larger project of colonial land alienation and settlement (Hoppe 1997). In Tanzania, the colonial government evicted rural populations from areas associated with sleeping sickness and deemed unlikely to ever be ‘fly-free’ – transforming them into game reserves for trophy hunting and safari tourism (Neumann 2001, 657). Examples outside Africa abound as well, such as in Guyana and Vietnam, where colonisers not only introduced or exacerbated zoonotic diseases but implemented disease control measures unevenly so only populations serving the interest of colonial powers were protected (Gampat 2015; Vann 2012). These cases illustrate how infrastructural violence is harnessed by those in power to unmake and reconfigure multispecies relations in the name of zoonotic disease management.

Another subset of built infrastructures enrolled in immobilising zoonoses includes research institutions, veterinary facilities, and diagnostic laboratories. Within these spaces, samples are tested and analysed with the aim of producing technological, biomedical, and pharmaceutical fixes to resist pathogenesis. Infrastructures are also built to protect against bioterrorism threats by securing access to biological agents and knowledge of these agents (Braun 2013). Infrastructures meant to prevent unknown or poorly understood microbes from being weaponised became a priority during the Cold War (Harrington 2018). In a global race to know and control pathogens, global powers built facilities in places where they feared terror groups would seize poorly understood pathogens as biological weapons (Harrington 2018).

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been renewed interest in built infrastructure for biosecurity, geopolitical, and biodefense purposes, with many states upgrading facilities to better prepare for public health crises and biowarfare (Borja et al., 2020). For example, the United States Agency for International Development launched a $125 million Discovery & Exploration of Emerging Pathogens – Viral Zoonoses project in 2021 to ‘collect and characterise viruses found in animals, and to identify and develop strategies to thwart pathogens that might gain the capacity to jump to humans and spark a global pandemic’ (Cohen 2023, para. 2). In 2023, this programme ended prematurely due to concerns about ‘creating a human-animal interface that wouldn’t naturally exist’ through the handling of wild animals to discover viruses or through subsequent lab leaks (Cohen 2023, para. 6). This situation reveals why we initially clarified that our proposed categories of infrastructure are not discrete or uniform in their possibilities; they are interconnected and have the potential to spark multiple – even contradictory – configurations of zoonotic disease. In this case, infrastructure built to immobilise pathogens was deemed to have strong potential to leak, rather than contain, pathogens.

4 Infrastructures that leak zoonoses

Infrastructures have a ‘tendency to disappear’ under the surface and into the background of day-to-day life until moments where breakdowns and failures occur (Anand 2012; Graham 2010). From dam ruptures to nuclear failures to toxic waste spills to burst pipes in homes, the implications of infrastructural breakdowns range from spectacular and devastating to pernicious and anxiety-inducing. A now well-established body of literature has developed around moments when failure propels infrastructure into view and to the forefront of our minds (Graham 2010; Graham and Thrift 2007; Latham and Layton 2019; Schwenkle, 2015).

In relation to zoonotic disease, even several years after the initial outbreak of COVID-19, debate continues about whether the virus that caused the pandemic accidently leaked from a facility that was meant to keep viruses secure, Wuhan Institute of Virology. Bioweapon conspiracy theorists regularly circulate new evidence of lab leaks in the media, playing into the public’s fear. Although the World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated the virus most likely originated in an animal and passed to humans through an intermediary animal host, several prominent scientists say a lab leak cannot be dismissed (Holmes et al., 2021, 12). Ultimately, it remains possible that infrastructure designed to control viruses failed in an incredibly spectacular way.

However, failure of these infrastructures can also be subtle and slow. This is exemplified by Cholera, an acute diarrhoeal infection that affects humans and some species of animals, including bison, cattle, and dogs. For decades, cholera was declining globally with improvements in water and sanitation infrastructure. In recent years, though, cases of cholera and cholera-associated deaths have surged (WHO 2022). Despite being easily managed with rehydration solutions, ongoing cholera outbreaks are causing high morbidity and mortality in vulnerable populations with a lack of access to adequate healthcare (WHO 2022). According to the WHO, one of the key drivers behind the surge in cholera outbreaks is the disrepair of water and sanitation infrastructures due in part to governance shortcomings, complex humanitarian crises, and climate change (WHO 2022). It is notable that nearly all countries reporting severe cholera outbreaks in recent years have experienced disaster events, such as cyclones (Mozambique, Malawi), flooding (Pakistan, Nigeria), and drought (Horn of Africa countries) (WHO 2022).

Although there is limited scholarship on infrastructures, (dis)repair, and pathogenic leakage, work on infrastructures that leak waste and toxic materials – including toxic chemicals related to disease control – lends itself well to analyses zoonotic disease (Prudham 2004; Auyero and Swistun 2008; Davies 2019; Kuchinskaya 2013; Nading 2014, 2017; Touhouliotis 2018). Like sewage and toxic waste, microbes with zoonotic potential can mix with water and find their way to humans through infrastructures that break or fail. Also like sewage and toxic waste, these microbes are difficult to control as they seep, spill out of, and spread from infrastructures meant to maintain separation between us and them. In literature on waste and toxic infrastructures, it is argued that leaks may occur when infrastructures are built with materials and techniques that have a limited lifespan or without changing circumstances, such as climate change, in mind (Hess et al., 2008). Over time, the probability of a breakdown or rupture increases, particularly if infrastructures have not been maintained.

Literature on slow leaks and spectacular breakdowns shows that these events are never simply technical failures. As Anand (2017) argues, however important a focus on materials is for understanding the technical reasons behind breakdown, failure is never just a natural or neutral phenomenon (Anand 2017). Failure often traces back to historical and contemporary socio-spatial inequalities that result in poor planning and design, underfunding and limited maintenance, and regulatory neglect (Schwenkel 2015; Anand et al., 2018). These realities are also situated in certain legal frameworks and political-economic ideologies, with some geographical scholarship linking (neo)liberalism and (neo)liberalisation to infrastructural breakdown, disrepair, and failure (Prudham 2004; Bowles 2022).

For example, several recent zoonotic epidemics are claimed to have begun and spread in large, informal settlements. In these densely populated spaces, piped water and waste disposal are often substandard, as the state forgoes responsibility for constructing, maintaining, and repairing infrastructure where people have settled without permission. Poor water and sanitation infrastructure allows for microbes to be transmitted through contaminated water, as with cholera. A lack of closed drainage and waste disposal infrastructure results in higher prevalence of rodent- and parasite-borne diseases (Ahmed et al., 2019). It can also leave pools of standing water that provide breeding grounds for vectors like mosquitoes (Eisenstein 2016; Filipović, 2021). Devoid of natural predators, such as dragonflies and fish, the emergence of mosquito landscapes in informal settlements has contributed to the transmission of vector-borne zoonoses, including dengue (Kaup, 2021; Gandy 2022, 2023). The leaky infrastructures that produce zoonotic disease situations, along with the infect-ability (i.e. vulnerability) of informal settlement dwellers (Waage et al., 2022), are not technical public health challenges per se but (by)products of long-standing inequalities (Harris and Carter 2019) and biases against marginalised urban groups (Ezeh et al., 2017) held up and reproduced through dominant planning regimes (Furlong, 2014).

5 Infrastructures that surveil zoonoses

The final category of infrastructure we develop is infrastructures that surveil zoonoses. Digital infrastructures – including broadband networks, data centres, cloud storage, and mobile and satellite communication networks – enable the collection, computation, storage, networking, analysis, and application of data on a planetary scale (Furlong 2020; Tripodi 2020). Combined with advances in audio-visual and photographic technologies, software development, cloud computing, machine learning, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital infrastructures are rapidly expanding the amount and type of data available for the surveillance of infection and disease. These infrastructures are promised to enable prevention, precaution, and preparedness by rendering microbes visible, intelligible, detectable, and treatable (Brown et al., 2015; Gardy and Loman 2018). Although many exist under the parochial lens of national security (Hester, 2020), public health and biosecurity discourse has affirmed that biosecurity requires looking beyond borders (Caduff 2014), resulting in the development of ‘scientific infrastructures of planetary observation’ (Fearnley, 2022, 33).

Global viral mapping projects, like the Global Virome Project and Nextstrain, are designed to supersede national territorial boundaries and enable observation of viruses across the planet (Fearnley, 2022). These programmes support the sampling and sequencing of viruses. Once samples are collected, AI and bioinformatics are used ‘to predict risk based on virus genotype, enabling the development of countermeasures before any outbreak occurs’ (Fearnley, 2022, 22). This type of open-source technical infrastructure for data sharing aims to foster global ownership of data and global responsibility to manage outbreaks, as well as protocols to guide responses to perceived global public health threats (Fearnley, 2022). Digital infrastructure supports global sampling and sharing so that authorities are prepared to dis/assemble configurations of human-animal-microbe interactions that might otherwise facilitate the emergence of zoonoses.

For some 30 years now, geographers have critically engaged with growing reliance on digital infrastructures for public health and biosecurity, showing how, despite techno-optimism and ample investment in speculative and pre-emptive infrastructures, our ability to fully prepare for outbreaks remains illusory (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Armondi et al., 2022; Caduff, 2014; Collier and Andrew, 2008; Donaldson and Wood, 2004; Fearnley, 2008; Hester, 2020; Keck, 2017, 2019; Keck and Lynteris, 2018; Lakoff, 2015; Lindsey, 2018; Roberts and Stefan, 2017). As recently demonstrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the promise and allure of preparedness continues to justify further innovation and intervention in the digital realm. The scope of technological efforts to ‘control the circulation of dangerous biological things’ (Caduff 2014, 106) is ever-expanding, with complex technological innovations, systems of surveillance, and cutting-edge biomedical research repeatedly mobilised to protect against potential harm (Hinchliffe 2013; Hinchliffe et al., 2013; Hinchliffe and Lavau 2013).

The development of cyborg infrastructures to surveil microbes with zoonotic potential within the bodies of their hosts is one of the more recent iterations of surveillance infrastructure. In a project funded by the United States’ Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency, scientists have attached GPS units to bats in Uganda to capture their movements and better understand how Marburg virus is spread to people (CDC 2022, para. 2). Through the project, the bodies of bats and technologies have been entangled to produce cyborg (Gandy 2005; Lokman 2017; Wolf and Hall 2018) infrastructures that generate and mobilise data with the intent of securing, eliminating, and neutralising disease risk. In this case, digital infrastructure itself becomes part of a new configuration of relations between animals, microbes, and humans aimed at unmaking zoonotic disease situations as – or even before – they emerge.

It is not only the bodies of wild animals that are being incorporated into and entangled with new digital infrastructures, but domestic animals and humans too. Governments and industry are piloting novel digital infrastructures that make it possible to identify and neutralise risk before it has a chance to spread across borders, become part of global supply chains, and manifest an outbreak. For example, authorities in Europe are experimenting with the use of thermal imaging heat sensors and cameras on large farms to detect diseases by monitoring changes in body temperature. These cameras can pinpoint raised temperatures on a single animal or specific body part of an animal, such as hoofs and udders, which may indicate an infection (Health for Animals, 2022). Sound detection technologies, such as microphones, are also being used to monitor and identify audible symptoms of disease, such as coughs or respiratory changes (Health for Animals, 2022). Wolf and Hall (2018, 487) use the term ‘cyborg preparedness’ to describe this type of arrangement, where the merging of human and nonhuman bodies and technologies all becomes part of the infrastructure of disease preparedness.

III Infrastructure, zoonoses, and bio-/necro-power

The main focus of this article so far has been complicating the notion that infrastructure either spreads or stops zoonoses. Recognising that the five categories of infrastructure we put forward are not as clear cut in reality as they are conceptually, they still have heuristic value in revealing the plurality of zoonotic disease situations made possible by different types of infrastructure. Our analysis of these categories shows that how infrastructure configures human-animal-microbe relations is never politically neutral or merely technical. Whether infrastructure is built to immobilise or surveil potential zoonotic pathogens, its disrepair or failure allows for leakage, or it inadvertently contributes to unmooring and circulating microbes; infrastructure works to sustain certain lives and not others (i.e. biopolitics) and kill-off certain lives to sustain others (i.e. necro-politics). Attending to subtle differences between infrastructure is therefore worthwhile, as each has its own more-than-human bio- and necro-politics of ‘modulating’ zoonoses (Barua 2021, 1474).

The concepts of bio- (Foucault 1978) and necro- (Mbembe, 2003) politics are related, but emphasise different attributes and workings of power. Biopolitics is mainly concerned with controlling the biology and health of populations to maximise their economic potential (Shortall and Brown, 2020). The concept describes the (neo)liberal rationality that aims ‘to ensure, sustain and multiply life’ and ‘to put this life in order’ (Foucault, 1978, 138). Sometimes framed as ‘make live, let die’ politics (Li 2010), ordering life involves calculated decisions about which populations are of value and ought to be sustained and which can be left to die. Necro-politics is the flipside of this coin, explaining how some populations are subjected to harm and death to maximise their economic potential and to maintain the wider social order (Mbembe, 2003). Infrastructures are integral to bio- and necro-power, as they sustain the life of populations (Renzi and Elmer 2013), inflict harm and death upon populations (Ranganathan 2020), and ‘settle and habituate routines of social order’ (Barua 2021, 1468).

There is growing acknowledgement within geography that infrastructure is not just a static material object assembled by humans for bio- and necro- political purposes, but a more-than-human process and socio-ecological relation (Barua 2021; Enns and Sneyd 2020; Kreike 2022). This work recasts infrastructure as a lively/deathly space of human-nonhuman entanglement, where humans, animals, plants, and other organisms are enrolled in and subjected to enactments of bio- and necro- political violence. This is evident in relationships between infrastructure and zoonoses, as it is never just humans being made live or made die through zoonotic disease situations configured by infrastructure, but populations of domestic and wild animals, insects and vectors, and hosts of microbial and microscopic life. What is crucial is that who – in the broadest sense of the word – among these diverse populations is made live and who is made die often aligns with patterns of inequality, power, and violence structured into society and results from calculated decisions about who should be protected from pathogenicity, inflicted with pathogenicity, and killed-off to sustain the lives of others (Anand 2017).

This is further illustrated by the mass culling of minks in Denmark during the COVID-19 pandemic. Because spaces of intensive, industrial animal farming are so conducive to zoonotic (re)emergence and transmission, Danish mink farms have infrastructures in place to manage the pathogenic transmission of microbes. These include surveillance systems that monitor live animals and cages that prevent contact with outside animals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a mutation of the virus began to spread in mink farms after the virus was transmitted from human handlers to minks and then back to humans. The virus spread with ease through cages, revealing the material inadequacy of the infrastructure designed to minimise disease risk. In this situation, infrastructure meant to sustain life ended up allowing pathogens to flow and infect the population with ease. Furthermore, even though the mutation was unlikely a grave threat to humans, 17 million minks were culled as a risk mitigation measure (Murray 2020). Ultimately, the mass slaughter of minks was deemed to make more economic sense than permitting the disease to circulate (Keck 2020), underscoring Green’s (2022) point that the economics of life often involve a great deal of death.

The case of Danish mink farms makes clear that zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure are always indicative of dominant bio- and necro-political logics. By implication, human and nonhuman populations deemed by those with power to be an economic liability, of less value, or surplus are relegated to a ‘constant state of injury’ (Mbembe, 2003, 21) from pathogenesis or made die ‘in the name of the vitality of other forms of life’ (Braun 2013, 54). Similarly, infrastructural failings in the form of slow leaks or spectacular breakdowns may produce ‘sacrifice zones’ (Lerner 2012, 3), where populations beyond the limits of those seen as worth saving are let die. Whether by design or through failure, infrastructure is never a politically neutral force. Paying attention to the bio- and necro-politics of how different types of infrastructure modulate zoonoses can expand understanding of how infrastructural violence occurs, who is affected and how, and for what grander – if not darker – purpose. At the same time, these different types of infrastructure can also serve as powerful ‘frames to recast and rethink the political’ (Barua 2021, 1468).

IV Infrastructuring otherwise

With the bio- and necro-politics of modulating zoonoses through infrastructure apparent, questions about what alternatives exist and how they should be pursued remain open-ended. Given how interconnected infrastructures are with structures of power, the prospect of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise may seem far-fetched. Yet ample opportunities exist for recasting and rethinking the political possibilities of infrastructured human-animal-microbe relations. As Barua writes: ‘there is nothing inherently capitalist or neoliberal about more-than-human infrastructures: they are amenable to capture but the latter does not always have to be the default position. As collective platforms, such infrastructures open up other possibilities for life, one that eschews capitalist biopower and heralds forms of commoning’ (2021, 1482). With the hope of continuing to guide action and thought on infrastructure and zoonoses in this direction, this final section draws from recent geographical scholarship to highlight three principles of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise.

1 Anti-anthropocentric infrastructures

To start, infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise requires anti-anthropocentric infrastructures. Anthropocentrism places humans at the centre of all things (Probyn-Rapsey 2018, 47) – producing and reinforcing hierarchies between humans, other animals, and the natural world. Many of the infrastructures discussed above are heavily inflected with anthropocentrism, as they immobilise, segregate, and cull nonhuman populations deemed risky. The logic of these infrastructures – which is to limit contagion through spatial separation of ‘clean and dirty’, ‘healthy and diseased’ bodies – often reflects colonial aspirations of controlling nature to secure certain forms of life (Gandy 2022; Waller 2004). Yet, now, ever more complex techniques and technologies are used to segragate, immobilise, and secure animals and pathogens (Ahuja 2016).

Anti-anthropocentrism emphasises a shared animality between humans and other species (Narayanan 2023). From this view, creating a more livable planetary future requires overcoming human supremacy and nonhuman exploitation to achieve multispecies liberation, justice, and equality (Narayanan 2023). A growing body of geographical scholarship points to examples of anti-anthropocentric infrastructure, recognising that infrastructural work can be done by and for the more-than-human world (Carse 2012, 2014; Barura, 2021; Enns and Sneyd 2020; Hetherington 2018; Howe et al., 2016; Jensen and Morita 2017; Kreike 2013; Martin et al., 2021; Wakefield 2018, 2020). In the realm of zoonotic disease control, anti-anthropocentric infrastructure could involve a shift away from infrastructures that separate humans and nonhumans – in a futile attempt to control all microbes – towards infrastructures that enable us to better co-exists despite the presence of zoonoses in our bodies, shared spaces, and futures.

Returning to our own work, pastoralists in northern Kenya describe mobility as one strategy for coexisting with potentially hazardous lifeforms and pathogens. They explain that moving seasonally with livestock can help avoid zoonotic disease outbreaks associated with certain seasons and that following particular routes can help avoid vector hotspots – such as forests filled with tsetse flies or waterbanks that harbour intestinal parasites. Historically, during severe health events, such as anthrax outbreaks, it was common for pastoralists to pack up and leave an area to prevent the disease from spreading. As Maru et al. suggest of pastoralist systems elsewhere in eastern Africa: ‘immobility signifies illness’ while ‘mobility is metaphorically conceived as the cure’ (2022, 10). In northern Kenya, the link between im/mobility and ill/health extends beyond populations to ecosystems. This is increasingly supported by western scientific research as well (Kristensen et al., 2022; Manzano et al., 2023; Scoones 2023).

These examples should not be misconstrued as suggesting that populations should be left to fend for themselves against ill-health. Rather, they present an argument for supporting and restoring infrastructures that allow people to live with – rather than against – microbial life (Hinchliffe 2022; Lorimer 2017, 2019; Tsing et al., 2019). In contexts like northern Kenya, this may require a radical recasting and rethinking of the politics of carceral, violent infrastructures that are often taken for granted but are no less essential to (neo)liberal orderings of life, such as fences.

2 Care-full infrastructures

Infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise also necessitates care-full infrastructures. Here, we are inspired by Alam and Houston, who call for ‘a care-full infrastructural “turn” in geographical’ scholarship (2020, 102,662). Care is an ‘activity that includes everything we do to maintain, continue and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto 1995, 103). For Power (2019), Power and Mee (2020) and Power and Williams (2020), a care-full perspective sees care, itself, as infrastructure. These scholars call for greater attention to everyday infrastructures that enable us to live well, and place greater value on those whose labour enables care to happen. This includes hidden, ordinary, and nurturing forms of social reproductive and reparative work done by individual, community, and material networks that underpin the organisation of social life (Clark et al., 2023). Although the idea of care-full infrastructure has been developed through work on social reproduction and care of humans, it is useful in thinking about the care of nonhumans and more-than-human wellness as well.

There was a resurgence of interest in care-full infrastructures during the pandemic, with alternative food and production systems, such as community gardens and hobby farms (Williams and Tait, 2023) and pastoralism (Seetah et al., 2020), underscoring the importance of infrastructures that sustain collective, caring approaches to production – particularly during times of crisis and uncertainty (Scoones, 2023). Seetah et al. (2020) argue that aspects of caring for livestock among pastoralists in eastern Africa – like keeping relatively small numbers of animals and being aware of each animal and able to recognise a sick individual – may be more effective in preventing zoonotic disease outbreaks than novel forms of digital surveillance infrastructure in industrial animal processing facilities. A herder is likely to notice small lesions on their animals’ skin, changes in stool, or subtle shifts in behaviour and movement in ways technology cannot (yet) replicate. Thus, pastoralists’ care infrastructure may allow a sick animal to be dealt with before disease spreads; whereas in industrial systems, diseases often spread unnoticed and many animals are slaughtered in a relatively short span of time (Seetah et al., 2020).

Work by Pasternak (2017) and LaDuke and Cowen (2020) differentiates between infrastructures grounded in an ontology of care from those grounded in an ontology of supply, describing the former as life giving and the latter as infrastructures of death. Although infrastructures grounded in ontologies of care might still have their own politics of ordering life – and death – these are likely to differ quite radically from dominant bio- and necro-politics that prioritise capitalist accumulation, expansion, and extraction (Pasternak, 2023). Thus, while pastoralists in eastern Africa may still see economic value in livestock and manage their herds with this in mind, some also describe livestock as the heart of their communities. If the heart is healthy, so too is everything it sustains and relies upon: community, culture, ecology, economy, land, and so on. Examples of care-full infrastructures such as this serve as a reminder that ‘another possible is possible’ (Escobar 2020,1), and that, even in the context of everyday life for many people around the world, opportunities abound for configuring human-animal-microbe relations and structuring relations with zoonoses in ways that are far more care-full.

3 Probiotic infrastructures

Finally, infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise involves managing life with life. Lorimer uses the term ‘probiotic’ to describe interventions that work with biological and geomorphic processes to reconfigure biological systems and to modulate the ‘rhythm and intensities of their ecological interactions’ with the health of populations and environments in mind (2020, 2). Probiotic interventions differ from intolerant, violent treatment of ‘awkward organisms’ – predominant in modern, technical approaches to disease control and pest management – by seeking to foster an immunocompetent ability to live together” through the ‘presence, not absence, of life’ (Cusworth and Lorimer, 2023, 496; 465; Hinchliffe et al., 2013). This aspect of infrastructuring otherwise sees value in infrastructure that creates and holds space for microbes in human-animal relationships to support the good health of humans, animals, and shared environments.

In eastern Africa, some pastoralists have been shown to develop strong immune responses to certain zoonoses through long-term exposure to microbes carried by livestock, such as mycobacterioses (Kankya et al., 2010). Many pastoralists have also relied upon controlled exposure to certain zoonotic pathogens to develop their livestock’s immunity to diseases, such as East Coast Fever (Waller 2004). These types of zoonotic disease situations are not unique to pastoralism or eastern Africa. Recent serological studies from China suggest that frequent interactions with bats and viruses they carry may leave behind antibodies and varying levels of immunity in rural human populations (Wang et al., 2018). Examples of immune systems benefiting from controlled, regular interactions between humans, animals, and microbes demonstrate how biological processes can serve as probiotic infrastructures for more-than-human health, life, and sociality in a pathogenic world.

Yet it is important not to essentialise or romanticise probiotic infrastructures. Questions and uncertainties still surround probiotics, broadly defined, requiring greater understanding across epistemological divides and traditions of the ideal practices and processes, possibilities and pitfalls, of probiotic infrastructures in diverse settings (Lorimer 2020). It is also important to acknowledge that, in many contexts, relying upon or (re)turning to probiotics is not strictly a choice or form of ontological politics. In northern Kenya, the ongoing relevance of probiotic infrastructures may also be due to long-standing inequalities in the provision of medical and veterinary services – including acaricides and antibiotics – that might be welcomed by many pastoralists. With these considerations in mind, as a principle of infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise, probiotic approaches offer powerful critiques of the status quo in zoonotic disease management and potential pathways to transformative alternatives (Lorimer 2020).

V Concluding comments and future directions

Our review of geographical scholarship leads us to a series of guiding questions for further research, particularly as infrastructures for zoonotic disease control and surveillance shift to the top of policy agendas globally. These questions include the following: Which human and nonhuman lives do new and existing infrastructures save and which do they abandon, subject to harm, or cull? How do zoonotic disease situations configured through infrastructure intersect and interact with broader hierarchies and patterns of inequality among human and nonhuman populations? How, when, where, and why are pathogens – zoonotic or otherwise – enrolled in the bio- and necro-political work of infrastructure? Conversely, to what extent does the microbial world shape bio- and necro-political infrastructure agendas? What alternatives exist or are imaginable for infrastructuring zoonoses, and how can these be supported or built on to amplify multispecies justice and the body-, life-, and spirit-sustaining potential of infrastructuring otherwise?

An ongoing research agenda responsive to these questions could help advance critical geographical engagement with infrastructure and zoonoses and support anti-anthropocentric, care-full, and probiotic infrastructures in a (post)pandemic world. As Cowen explains, ‘Alternative worlds require alternative infrastructures’ (as cited in, Pasternak, 2023). Saving space for these worlds in our discourses, minds, and realities means ‘embracing uncertainty and fostering often unruly, diverse alternatives’ while ‘rejecting the illusions of “control”’ that give power to dominant bio- and necro-political interventions (Leach et al., 2021, 9). This also requires being open to transdisciplinary mutualisms ‘that cut across spaces of knowledge production’ (Lorimer 2020, 15) with the potential to benefit knowledge of diverse approaches to infrastructuring zoonoses otherwise. As a space of interdisciplinary, justice-oriented, more-than-human research, geography could play a useful role in locating where these mutualisms might lie and keeping the promise of alternative infrastructural worlds alive.