Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance: Moralities,power,space

Abstract

This article Introduces a theme issue on ‘Repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance’. The collection examines the spatial politics implicit in what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance: the increasingly frequent resort to experiments with novel technologies to govern myriad sustainability challenges. This article introduces the articles in the collection and outlines three core themes addressed across the issue: How the technological turn often centres on articulating new forms of legibility at a distance; the ways that experiments with new technologies articulate new kinds of relationships across space and across the public/private boundary; and the implications of these changes for questions of accountability, power, and decision-making.

This theme issue interrogates what we call the ‘technological turn’ in sustainability governance. By this, we mean a growing tendency to rely on ‘innovative’ applications, by a range of public, private, and hybrid authorities, of new technologies as means of governing emergent sustainability problems. Contributors to this issue examine unfolding experiments deploying, among other things, Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain, big data, and digital apps in tracking greenhouse emissions, delivering humanitarian aid, monitoring material and human flows across global supply chains, combatting human trafficking, and managing the COVID-19 pandemic. These technological trials are frequently presented by their proponents in heavily depoliticized terms—understood, in Burnham’s useful terms, as ‘placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’ (Burnham, 2001: 128). Not only do the technological experiments we trace here seek to reduce complex and power-laden moral and political questions down to technical solutions, but in doing so they often blur lines of accountability, delegating difficult decisions to amorphous markets, to opaque technical standards, and even to ‘automated’ systems. They insert new forms of social and spatial distancing between public and private decision-makers and those most affected by sustainability governance, and often obscure or diffuse the locus of decision-making itself.

This theme issue examines and challenges these dynamics. In a word, we aim at repoliticizing the technological turn in sustainability governance. Contributors show how enrolling digital technologies into sustainability governance empowers certain actors, populations, and networks while disempowering others. The technological turn also embeds and entrenches particular rationalities, moralities, and modes of practice that we argue can and should be scrutinized through a variety of theoretical approaches.

These questions, we argue further below, inevitably turn on the politics of space and scale. Policy and practitioner debates about sustainable technology (SusTech) experiments have generally been concerned with the affordances and pathologies of particular technologies (see Beaumier et al., 2020 for an overview). There have been critical analyses of related issues around the quantification and measurement of sustainable development (e.g. Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen et al., 2018). There remains scope for exploring the politics underpinning the ways that emergent technologies are being developed, deployed, and diffused as mechanisms of governance across variegated spaces, and the kinds of spatial connections and distancing effects enacted in the process (see however Bernards et al., 2020; Howson et al., 2019).

These dynamics are no doubt present in many realms of governance, but are particularly acute in the governance of ‘sustainability’. ‘Sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ are contested and somewhat ambiguous concepts. We are broadly interested here in interventions across the range of policy areas grouped under the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework. We recognize real debates about the internal consistency of the SDG framework (e.g. Hickel, 2019; Rai et al., 2019), about the politics of measuring SDGs (Fukada-Parr and McNeill, 2019), and fundamental contestation over the purpose and nature of the goals themselves (Gabay and Ilcan, 2017). We nonetheless argue that the SDGs are useful in delineating ‘sustainability’ as a socially-defined sphere of action in global policy-making.

In re-politicizing applications of emerging technologies in sustainability governance, contributors to this themed issue collectively suggest that these technological experiments should be viewed as more complex and evolving attempts to render locally situated activities legible from a distance, trace movements of people and objects through space and across borders, and may often strive to solve deeply political issues with technical and bureaucratic fixes. In this introduction, we elaborate on these collective themes and situate the theme issue in ongoing conversations at the intersections of the fields of Anthropology, Geography, International Relations, Law, and Sociology.

Interrogating the spatial and political dynamics of sustainability techno-experiments

Sustainability governance has long involved various forms of technologies that have been positioned as solutions to complex problems (Johnston, 2020). These technologies bring together a variety of spaces to deliver transparency and streamline labor and resource accountability. The technological turn, in short, extends the logics and exacerbates the tensions of existing sustainability governance. The limits to the technological turn are further highlighted in the applications of emerging technologies for addressing sustainability challenges through highly managerial modes of coordination. Guided by the rationalities of modern financial accounting systems, the prevailing techniques of standardization and measurement can cast sustainability governance issues as largely technical and apolitical (see also Eagleton-Pierce and Knafo, 2020; Shore and Wright, 2015). Such hierarchical modes of coordination often rely on ‘multi-stakeholder’ arrangements between private for-profit firms and public bodies. Sustainability expertise is increasingly outsourced to third-party sustainable investment ratings that in their form and function can be compared to major credit rating agencies (Hughes et al., 2021). Here, profit incentives risk further fragmenting standards and enforcement across the proliferating range of sustainability services. These modes of governance are increasingly reliant on and enacted through experiments with new technologies. The technological turn is increasingly central to the (marketized, managerial) governance of sustainability problems.

A shared emphasis on spatial politics in the ‘technological turn’ in global sustainability governance runs across this theme issue. Applications of emergent technologies are shown to work through and enact particular social and spatial imaginaries, power configurations, and specific diagnoses of sustainability challenges. Contributors highlight three interrelated spatial-political dynamics. First, they explore how forms of surveillance in technological experiments aim to make dispersed material flows and dispersed localized activities legible at a distance. Second, in questioning what is measured, how, and for whom, we repoliticize experiments in sustainability governance by investigating distributional implications and inequalities that often remain under-explored amidst more technical discussions. Third, the articles study how the technological turn reworks transnational relationships at play in global governance, (re)creating political spheres that cut across scales, and often across the murky boundaries of ‘public’ and ‘private’ in new ways. This theme issue thus scrutinizes how the technological turn in sustainability governance reconfigures existing transnational linkages while forging new political spaces. We do so, collectively, in engagements with three interrelated themes: questions of legibility and distancing, the spatial and scalar restructuring of governance through the technological turn, and the remaking of power and accountability.

Enhancing legibility at a distance

This theme issue foregrounds the politics of tracing and mobility across space (see Muirhead and Porter, 2019). Novel technologies are increasingly deployed as a means of following the movements of objects and people through space and across borders. This surveillance is far from apolitical: what is traced, how, and for whom are power-laden questions (De Goede, 2018) with frequently under-acknowledged distributional implications.

One particularly prominent stream comes from the broad development and integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) factors in financial investment decisions (see Dimmelmeier, this issue). Aligning financial objectives with broader social and environmental goals seeks to allow investors a better understanding of risks and opportunities while leading to a more resilient and inclusive economy. As some have noted, this can position ESG also as a direct response to the negative effects of the global financial crisis and bad press received by the likes of the global asset management industry since, offering finance new ways to align itself with ‘eco-efficiency’ (Clark and Dickson, 2024). This supposed ‘win-win’ of profits (and reputational laundering) for investors and sustainable transformation for people and planet throws up important tensions. Tracing the evolution of sustainable investment over the past few decades, Hughes et al. (2021) observe a movement from a ‘values-driven’ approach that prioritized societal good over economic returns, to a ‘value-driven’ model of sustainable investing where ethical and social concerns are expected to result in financial returns. ESG practices involve determining and supporting sustainability issues that are financially relevant to the performance of the company, which then become considered key metrics in investment decisions (Hughes et al., 2021: 2).

Standards for what counts as ‘sustainable finance’ vary and have remained contested even in the likes of international accounting fora (Maechler and Graz, 2020; Parfitt, 2024). Persistent ambiguities in what sustainable investment practices actually entail make it challenging to draw causal relationships between ESG and financial performance—potentially inhibiting accountability and crowding out other solutions (Pollman, 2022: 1). The response to these ambiguities has often entailed an increasing drive to define and measure sustainability indicators can therefore mark the emergence of the ‘market itself as an ethical subject’, and lead to equating economically efficient decision-making with an ethical one (Archer, 2022: 18). Efficiency thereby becomes a central grounding point for all types of other ethical evaluations, and a market that has access to ‘accurate’ information appears as more efficient and therefore more ethical. In other words, access to copious real-time data becomes a moral imperative (2022: 27; see also Fourcade and Healy, 2017).

The use of digital technologies, in particular, facilitates this data supply by extending the broader geographical reach of ESG information and widening public participation through more accessible aggregation processes (Hughes et al., 2021). At the same time, the techno-centers and alternative ESG rating agencies are also becoming more profit-driven, rather than motivated by ‘radical sustainability concerns’, with growing interconnectedness to financial centers and major financial services firms (2021: 20). ESG investment has grown rapidly as big data and other digital technologies have enabled investors to quantify hard-to-measure socio-political variables at a distance.

But while ESG investment is subject to increasingly intense controversy and growing analytical attention, similar questions are more widespread across various realms of sustainability governance. In their contribution to the issue, Bernards, Campbell-Verduyn and Rodima-Taylor develop a critical analysis of claims concerning the promise of blockchain technologies to address sustainability issues by building new forms of transparency in global supply chains. Their analysis highlights the importance of foregrounding the political and spatial dimensions of such technology applications, contending that while the attraction of the blockchain lies in its promise to enhance the traceability of materials provided through supply chains, these applications are often part of private-led compliance efforts and dominated by hierarchical structures of corporate power. The spatial breakdown of supply chains across geographies and industries relegates more risky and costly activities to peripheral places and workers. The governance of supply chains occurs through standardized modes of coordination that tend to depoliticize power imbalances entailed in global supply chains. Such private, corporate-led institutions and approaches overlook and marginalize local, grassroots solutions to sustainability challenges by casting a ‘veil of transparency’ over marginaliization and abuses across global supply chains. Examining the application of blockchain technology in cobalt supply chains to trace sourcing as a proxy for the presence of child labor, the article notes that this provides a ‘thin’ form of technical transparency, while obscuring a wide range of unsustainable labor and environmental practices and underlying socio-economic causes of child labor. Local labor in industrial, as well as artisanal mines, is often provided by poor and marginalized casual workers laboring in unsafe conditions. The questions of what data should be stored on the blockchain and how it should be analyzed are therefore fundamentally political and socially contested.

Responding to calls for more attention to the dynamics of governance in these digital spaces, the contribution by Porter and Rani explores the concept of legitimacy as it evolves in the interaction of technologies with human agency, to avoid reifying the autonomous and neutral capacities often attributed to technology. The article explores novel governance spaces that emerge with the capacities of technologies, such as mobile apps, to engage collective commitments towards shared outcomes. Such digital spaces tend to evolve into increasingly autonomous forms of governance eluding human control (see also Lessig’s, 2006 conceptualization of code as the law that can restrict human activity more efficiently than conventional law). Porter and Rani contend that the concept of legitimacy—or the belief in the rightfulness of a rule that can be shared collectively and can lead to greater social stability (see also Hurd, 2019)—enables a more effective analysis of the ‘mix of interests, ethical values, and factual evidence’ that is part of the constitution and evaluation of such digital spaces. This is illustrated at the example of two case studies, the COVID-19 contact tracing apps and digital anti-trafficking technologies, which differ by the power inequalities between the participants and the degree of public interest in the outcome. Attention is called to the ‘specific variable interactions’ between the technology and its users that may entail variations and contradictions among the interests of different actors, including individual users, the broader public, technology firms, or state institutions. An analytical focus on the concept of legitimacy thus allows for a more discerning analysis of the power imbalances and ethical choices that are involved in applying new digital technologies for particular purposes, rather than drawing overly broad generalizations about the capacity of the new digital technologies to amplify the risks of repression, or about their potential to mobilize collective action to solve environmental and social problems.

Spatial distributions of governance and markets

The themed issue considers how experimenting with new technologies re-configures the inter- and transnational relationships underpinning global sustainability governance. There is a growing recognition of the complex ways in which sustainability challenges are reshaping global politics (see Dalby, 2020). Theme issue contributors raise further concerns about the potential of the ‘technological turn’ in sustainable development to deepen North-South power disparities.

The article by Egger examines the rise of technology applications in humanitarian aid, showing how new technology initiatives to improve the efficiency of humanitarian responses can fundamentally alter the power dynamics by strengthening the role of states and private actors at the expense of affected communities. Scrutinising proclamations about the ‘game-changing’ potential of technological innovations in humanitarian governance, Egger proposes a nuanced typology of public-private partnerships (PPPs) involved in global humanitarian actions. Most of these stakeholder organisations are centrally driven by the private pursuit of profit-maximisation where smaller start-up firms test new products to scale in global markets beyond humanitarian settings, while more established tech multinationals seek to operationalize their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) agendas. Egger builds on techno-colonial critiques to draw out the disabling effect of PPPs on local governments. The article raises important questions about accountability for when projects fail, and points to a third, more open-ended model of PPPs in tech humanitarianism. It argues that more marginal, community-based digital humanitarianism models may foster local ownership of technologies better tailored to daily needs. The evidence Egger mobilizes through a principal-agent mapping of PPPs usefully draws out the uneven participation of actors of varying levels of power, and calls for a politicization of PPPs that pushes back on their tendency to strengthen profit-driven private actors at the expense of crisis-affected communities.

The power disparities that tend to endure on a global scale despite new technology experimentations are further evident, as noted above, in sustainable finance. While technological experiments seek to overcome well-documented challenges of disclosure, verification and commensuration in climate finance (see Thistlewaite and Paterson, 2016), there is evidence that they enhance the legibility of global spaces, material flows, and dispersed localities for some, but not for all. Campbell-Verduyn’s contribution to the theme issue shows how blockchain-based initiatives for sustainable finance render climate more amenable to market-based modes of governance. Examining geographically dispersed efforts to harness blockchain technologies for climate action by an Ottawa-based private organisation Climate Chain Coalition (CCC), the article identifies attempts at improving carbon markets through a ‘cool’ new technology as unlikely to contribute to cooling the planet. It traces diverse attempts to repurpose as climate change-combatting a set of technologies that became associated with financial speculation in the 2010s, and have an aggregate energy consumption of a medium-sized country. Blockchains, especially Bitcoin, became targeted by environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) like Greenpeace ¹ after indexes of the growing electricity consumption required to power them were published by a then PhD student at Vrije University in Amsterdam ² and the University of Cambridge in the U.K ³ . Through the CCC, however, blockchain start-ups responded by presenting blockchains as solutions rather than potential sources of climate crisis.

Campbell-Verduyn’s analysis zooms in on a central thrust of such efforts that seek to improve carbon markets by rendering national and regional offset markets more globally interoperable while also bringing climate finance products directly to people and beyond institutional investors around the world. Examining philosophical-cum-promotional white paper texts produced by blockchain climate finance start-ups, Campbell-Verduyn points to an absence of engagement with critiques about the limits of carbon markets and an enduring hope to address planetary problems by market improvements alone. The article points to the need to politicize such ‘imaginaries of improvement’ to interrogate who is improving what, where, and how, as it situates blockchain-based climate finance efforts in the wider speculative frenzies such as those resulting in the major scandal of KlimaDAO in 2021 (De Cristiano, 2024).

Elaborating on the complex interconnectedness of actors in global sustainability governance, the article by Dimmelmeier returns to ESG and situates unfolding technological experiments with environment, social and governance disclosures within a longer-run history of standardizing the measurement of these impacts in ways that are compatible with the imperatives of financial accumulation. Dimmelmeier stresses the emergence and evolution of a complex assemblage of standards, classifications, and technologies through which ‘sustainable’ investment practices have developed historically. The article charts several key shifts over time in the character of sustainable investment techniques, towards a much greater emphasis on standardized calculative models and data quality, alongside an increasingly embedded emphasis on financial materiality at the expense of wider ethical and social considerations.

Despite the ongoing widespread integration of ESG considerations into investment processes, the meaning of sustainable finance remains ambiguous, argues Dimmelmeier. He calls attention to the evolving ESG information infrastructure with its historical base in the 1980s-90s′ Socially Responsible Investment schemes that reworked technical devices from NGO advocacy and consumer information campaigns, with these, in turn, being expanded and amended by increasingly specialized ESG agencies in the 2000s. The ESG metrics were further modified by alternative tools from the repertoires of diverse institutions such as development banks and IOs. This historical perspective on sustainable finance infrastructures illustrates the gradual and incomplete nature of such technical devices that underlie present-day ESG initiatives. The recent additional challenges to ESG investing from entities associated with the Taskforce for Climate Related Financial Disclosures and EU taxonomy further illustrate the ‘blurring of the public versus private binary’ as such structures encourage the intermingling of technical tools and metrics designed by diverse actors that include regulators, NGOs, development banks, and investor groups. ESG thus reflects a complex amalgamation of public and private initiatives, but wrestles with existing standards and classification techniques for 'sustainable' investment in complex ways. Dimmelmeier, in sum, suggests framing the evolvement of the ESG information infrastructure in terms of ‘influence’ rather than ‘control’, to call attention to the connections of contextual and power shifts to the histories of modifying technical tools by diverse actors.

Governance for whom and for what purpose?

The technological turn also reflects transformations in relations of access, accountability, and decision-making. Contributors to this issue explore these questions in at least two ways. First, they ask what kinds of concerns are pursued, which aspects become emphasized, and which are overlooked in the ongoing techno-experimentation between states, transnational corporations, consultancy firms, and vulnerable populations targeted by sustainability governance initiatives. Egger shows in her contribution that humanitarian experimentation in public-private partnerships can lead to the continuation of asymmetrical aid practices, but with a digital twist resulting in ‘technologising the humanitarian business’ and ‘externalising the laboratory to crisis settings’. In a similar vein, Campbell-Verduyn highlights the frequent concerns of blockchain climate finance projects with market improvements even if such markets have never been proven to help combat climate change. On the contrary, such projects can distract attention from local and regional efforts to address a planetary crisis by providing yet more speculative opportunities to the benefit of actors in the Global North. While outlining the diverging rationale and impacts of two different kinds of digital technologies—the COVID-19 digital contact tracing apps and digital anti-trafficking technologies—Porter and Rani point out that these differ also by the power inequalities involved in their application. They therefore warn against overgeneralizing about the capacity of the new digital technologies to amplify the risks of surveillance and repression or mobilizing constructive collective action. Porter and Rani draw out important tensions around democratic control and accountability stemming from the delegation of key elements of these systems to private technology firms. Contributing towards a methodology for a more discerning study of power in global sustainability governance, Dimmelmeier finally argues that an infrastructural perspective of sustainable finance helps overcome the limitations of macro-political ‘evolutionary narratives’ that foreground the separation of organizations with their specific histories, and enable more attention to the micro-politics of the interaction of new devices with the installed base. He points out that ESG scores work to conflate 'input' and 'output' measures, relative and absolute thresholds, into singular measures legible to financial market participants. While such measures may have some financial merit, they are ‘counterproductive and obscuring from a public goods angle.’

Secondly, the articles in this theme issue explore whether existing disparities in access, participation, and benefits in these techno-initiatives are reinforced rather than overcome, and what modalities of (in)equality and (dis)empowerment might emerge. Egger highlights the accountability concerns that plague many humanitarian technological innovations, due to their ‘strong disabling effects on government structures’ and the institutional vacuum left by states and donor organizations in the shadow of these projects. The community-based digital humanitarianism projects are more likely to empower crisis-affected communities and increase local ownership of aid initiatives when they build on locally available technologies and use patterns. Furthermore, as Bernards, Campbell-Verduyn and Rodima-Taylor point out, the new technologies can cast a ‘veil of transparency’ over sustainability abuses and worsen North-South inequalities. In cobalt supply chains, interactions between transnational corporations and local artisanal miners in the Congo are further complicated by the enormous magnitudes of economic informality and lack of technological access in local communities. While blockchain-based global supply chains create illusions of increased visibility, they may effectively exclude such marginalized populations from the realm of political contestability. Such applications can therefore strengthen the disparities of power in global production networks and perpetuate the pathologies of existing forms of private governance.

Collectively, then, the articles in this issue point to important paths forward for understanding and challenging the depoliticizing tendencies of the turn to technology, and of many of the debates about them. Work on these articles began several cycles of technological hype ago—perhaps evidenced in the first place by the fact that it includes multiple articles on blockchain and little discussion on generative AI and large language models (LLMs). As we write this editorial, the latter occupy headlines indicating that there is far more to be done to highlight the materialities, moralities, and power politics of emerging technologies as they become integrated in global governance more widely (building on e.g. Crawford, 2021; Dauvergne, 2020). The core set of questions this theme issue raises continues to be pertinent to a broad set of evolving contexts, by unpacking the often-obscured political dimensions of technological applications in sustainability governance and highlighting the centrality of issues of space and scale.