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The politics of percentage: Informating justice in the US clean energy rush
Abstract
Within days of taking office in January 2021, President Biden signed an executive order establishing the Justice40 initiative, which directed federal agencies to ensure that at least 40% of the benefits of federal investments flow to historically marginalized communities. This article traces how Justice40, as interpreted and enacted by government bureaucrats, academics, industry researchers, and activists, intervenes in the governance of the energy transition it seeks to put into motion. Drawing from ongoing critical participation in energy research and development arenas and taking inspiration from Kim Fortun’s notion of the “informating of environmentalism,” this article argues that Justice40 can be understood as an attempt to informate justice, rendering it into problems that can be understood, manipulated, and audited through information systems. Scrambling to manage their accountabilities to the executive branch, Congress, and the American taxpayers footing the bill for massive infrastructure investments, Department of Energy programs are rolling out intricate systems of quantification, whose objectives of commensurability obscure local conceptions and prioritizations of justice. While Justice40 articulates lofty goals of energy transition enhancing the wellbeing of people who have otherwise been harmed by or excluded from the country’s existing energy infrastructure, its everyday practice has the ironic effect of undermining both epistemic and procedural justice.
... Some commentators have lauded the DOE for advancing further than other agencies in Justice40 implementation (Walls et al., 2024), including by requiring applicants to submit a Community Benefits Plan (CBP) addressing Justice40 requirements, oriented around eight DOE-specific policy priorities (Fig. 2). Still, critics note the DOE's problematic overreliance on quantification and highlight that its operationalization of Justice40 is becoming increasingly bureaucratic rather than decreasing (Smith, 2024). ...
The Justice40 Initiative, established by the Biden Administration through Executive Order 14008, aims to ensure 40% of the benefits associated with relevant governmental investments in areas such as climate and energy go to disadvantaged communities. However, persistent structural limitations pose challenges for energy researchers and engineers seeking to integrate justice into research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) activities, ultimately inhibiting full realization of Justice40. Using the Systemic Equity framework, this policy position paper highlights inadequacies in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) funding model and proposes changes to RD&D funding opportunity announcements (FOAs) to support the in-depth community engagement necessary for more equitable technology creation and demonstration. The recommended changes to FOAs are provided to encourage DOE Program Offices to rethink the RD&D funding process, the values that are fortified (intentionally or unintentionally) in that process, and systematically recenter RD&D processes on the goal Justice40 set out to achieve—a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.
Energy equity and justice have become priority considerations for policymakers, practitioners, and scholars alike. To ensure that energy equity is incorporated into actual decisions and analysis, it is necessary to design, use, and continually improve energy equity metrics. In this article, we review the literature and practices surrounding such metrics. We present a working definition for energy justice and equity, and connect them to both criteria for and frameworks of metrics. We then present a large sampling of energy equity metrics, including those focused on vulnerability, wealth creation, energy poverty, life cycle, and comparative country-level dynamics.We conclude with a discussion of the limitations, gaps, and trade-offs associated with these various metrics and their interactions thereof.
This article examines the far-reaching implications of Sally Engle Merry’s seminal multi-sited research on human rights measurement and monitoring. As she argued, human rights indicators, which form the basis for measurement, depend upon a highly elaborate, and largely obscured, process of commensuration. Through commensuration, complex social, legal, and economic phenomena are treated as variables that can be measured using statistical procedures that flatten the underlying complexities. Commensuration, in this sense, takes place at all levels: local, subnational, national, and international. At each stage, the process of “measuring justice” through commensuration has the paradoxical effect of becoming more precise as variables become more detached from the nuances of everyday conflicts. In Merry’s analysis, the global “seductions of quantification” reinforce the dominance of commensurability as an ideology of both scientific validity and social change. Drawing on both Merry’s work and wider comparative research in the anthropology of human rights and justice, this contribution to the symposium argues that the anthropological critique of commensuration carries important lessons for the meanings of “justice” more generally. How can justice be measured at a global level if, as Merry’s research shows, the underlying factors that supposedly reflect injustice are highly specific, contingent, and, most importantly, incommensurable? As a potential way out of this dilemma, the article explores the possibilities of conceptualizing “justice” in the vernacular, an approach grounded in local cultural and ethical realities.
Historically, academic and government environmental justice (EJ) research and communication efforts have centered on quantifying, mapping, and visualizing the environmental harms faced by EJ communities (communities facing disproportionate levels of environmental harm). Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck critiques such frameworks as “damage-centered” because they cast entire communities—predominantly low-income, BIPOC communities—as lacking or lesser. In this case study, we identify three core pitfalls of damage-centered research in government agency EJ projects—reification, obfuscation, and discretization—through our analysis of two important U.S. federal EJ data tools and related policies: the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)'s EJSCREEN, and the recently unveiled Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST). We center our study on the depiction of the Chelsea Creek Region in Massachusetts. In response, we describe preliminary research on an alternative approach to communicating EJ issues based on a relational rather than damage-centered EJ framework that advances relationships as the fundamental unit of both analysis and redress—in this case the Greater Boston region's relationship to and responsibility for ongoing environmental harms in the Chelsea Creek region.
Epistemic resources, including concepts, categories, and metrics, are invented regularly. Yet this process of epistemic innovation has not been recognized in responsible innovation (RI) scholarship. I argue that it should be: epistemic innovation can foster central goals of RI, including anticipatory governance and alignment with the goal of epistemic justice. An RI framework can help direct and evaluate epistemic innovation, as shown in three examples of epistemic innovation in communities adjacent to oil refineries: initiated without RI in mind, not all were well aligned with epistemic justice and each would have been strengthened by a stronger commitment to deliberation and foresight. These examples highlight challenges to achieving responsible epistemic innovation: having innovation be mistaken for error; coalescing experience and data into intelligible epistemic resources; and structuring inclusive deliberation. These challenges can be addressed by developing new forms of material deliberation and including resources for responsible epistemic innovation in RI policy.
Increasingly, scholarly debates and policy developments on citizen participation in energy transitions have included calls for 'energy democracy' and active forms of 'energy citizenship'. The concepts are tightly connected to the debate on energy transition, and the need for a decentralised energy system, based on renewable energy and increased local energy ownership. The two concepts exist in parallel and are sometimes used as synonyms and sometimes with clear distinctions made between them. This spurred an interest to systematically investigate them further. The aim of this paper is to identify similarities and differences between the two concepts and synthesise their contributions to debates on citizen participation in energy transitions. We review the literature thematically, finding that the concepts often refer to participation in domestic energy technologies, energy communities, energy transition movements, and energy policy. Energy citizenship tends to emphasise behaviour change and ways for individuals to participate in energy systems, thereby often focusing on individuals as agents of change. In contrast, energy democracy tends to focus on institutionalisation of new forms of participative governance and often placing collectives as central agents of change. The review also highlights some weaknesses of the literature: a bias towards decentralised energy systems, a lack of attention to representational democracy, and an underrepresentation of studies from outside Europe and North America.
Calculation and quantification have been critical features of modern societies, closely linked to science, markets, and administration. In the past thirty years, the pace, purpose, and scope of quantification have greatly expanded, and there has been a corresponding increase in scholarship on quantification. We offer an assessment of the widely dispersed literature on quantification across four domains where quantification and quantification scholarship have particularly flourished: administration, democratic rule, economics, and personal life. In doing so, we seek to stimulate more cross-disciplinary debate and exchange. We caution against unifying accounts of quantification and highlight the importance of tracking quantification across different sites in order to appreciate its essential ambiguity and conduct more systematic investigations of interactions between different quantification regimes.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 45 is July 30, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
en This essay considers how people working in the oil and gas industry in Colorado perceive their involvement in energy exploration in relation to broader practices of devotion, compassion, and outreach. I argue that although their energy projects may appear to merely echo companies’ formal promotional pitches, the oilfield and corporate actors’ own moral ambitions reveal more‐than‐human cosmoeconomic visions of oil's potentiality. This essay thus demonstrates how multiple and diverging ethical registers intersect and inform the valuation of oil.
Abstrait
fr Projets de dévotion : prospection énergétique et ambition morale dans la cosmoéconomie du pétrole et du gaz dans l'Ouest des États‐Unis
Résumé
Cet essai examine la manière dont les travailleurs du pétrole et du gaz au Colorado perçoivent leur implication dans la prospection énergétique en relation avec des pratiques plus larges de dévotion, de compassion et de relations de proximité. Bien que leurs projets énergétiques semblent uniquement faire écho aux éléments de langage promus par les entreprises, les ambitions morales personnelles des acteurs sur les gisements et dans les entreprises révèlent des visions cosmoéconomiques des potentialités du pétrole qui vont au‐delà de l'humain. L'auteure montre ainsi comment de multiples registres éthiques divergents se recoupent et entrent en compte dans la valorisation du pétrole.
Growing anthropological research on energy provides critical explorations into the cross-cultural ways in which people perceive and use this fundamental resource. We argue that two dominant frameworks animate that literature: a critique of corporate and state power, and advocacy for energy transitions to less carbon-intensive futures. These frameworks have narrowed the ethical questions and perspectives that the discipline has considered in relation to energy. This is because they are animated by judgements that can implicitly shape research agendas or sometimes result in strong accusations that obscure how our interlocutors themselves may considers the rightness and wrongness of energy resources and the societal infrastructures of which they form a part. We propose a more capacious approach to studying energy ethics that opens up energy dilemmas to ethnographic inquiry. As such, we show how energy dilemmas constitute important sites for the generation of anthropological knowledge, encouraging more insightful and inclusive discussions of the place of energy in human and more-than-human lives. © 2019 The Authors. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute
Understanding the role of large energy corporations in society is a crucial, yet challenging task for the social science of energy. Ethnographic methods hold potential for plying into corporations’ own self-representations, to reveal the relations of power and politics that determine flows of energy and extractive capital at the global and local level. Ethnography help us move beyond structural analyses, to locate the agents and processes at work within economies of energy production, and identify tensions and dynamics both within the corporation and at the interface with society. We argue that a multi-method and reflexive approach can help social scientists reflect on frictions in corporate encounters, and more importantly that attention to frictions is in fact a gateway to gain new insights about the field. In our research project about Norwegian energy companies and their corporate social responsibility work when ‘going global’ applying a multi-method made us question dominant assumptions within anthropology of what constitutes “access”. We discuss how multiple approaches to “access” which takes into account the positionality of the researcher, fluidity of research fields along with attention to power dynamics can shape the sort of knowledge that is produced when studying energy companies.
All too often, energy policy and technology discussions are limited to the domains of engineering and economics. Many energy consumers, and even analysts and policymakers, confront and frame energy and climate risks in a moral vacuum, rarely incorporating broader social justice concerns. Here, to remedy this gap, we investigate how concepts from justice and ethics can inform energy decision-making by reframing five energy problems — nuclear waste, involuntary resettlement, energy pollution, energy poverty and climate change — as pressing justice concerns. We conclude by proposing an energy justice framework centred on availability, affordability, due process, transparency and accountability, sustainability, equity and responsibility, which highlights the futurity, fairness and equity dimensions of energy production and use.
Few social issues depend as heavily on scientific information as environmental problems. Yet activists, governmental officials, corporate entities, and even scientists agree that much of the science behind environmental risk assessments is controversial and uncertain. Using a low-income African-American neighborhood as a primary case example, this paper illustrates in concrete terms how environmental risk assessments can exclude the experiences of the poor and people of color. Further, race and class experiences intensify a community's susceptibility to, and perceptions of, risk. These experiences and perceptions underpin the ways that communities contest scientific biases in everyday practice. After discussing alternative approaches to contemporary risk assessment that combine ethnographic research with other kinds of scientific expertise, I conclude by offering a four-fold model for resolving some of the problems raised by this essay. This model draws upon multiple kinds of knowledge bases and includes research, advocacy, policy recommendations, and theoretical innovation.
In this open letter, Eve Tuck calls on communities, researchers, and educators to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered" research—research that intends to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression. This kind of research operates with a flawed theory of change: it is often used to leverage reparations or resources for marginalized communities yet simultane-ously reinforces and reinscribes a one-dimensional notion of these people as depleted, ruined, and hopeless. Tuck urges communities to institute a moratorium on damage-centered research to reformulate the ways research is framed and conducted and to reimagine how findings might be used by, for, and with communities. Dear Readers, Greetings! I write to you from a little desk in my light-filled house in New York State, my new home after living in Brooklyn for the past eleven years. Today, New York does not seem so far from St. Paul Island, one of the Pribilof Islands of the Aleutian chain in Alaska, where my family is from and where my relations continue to live. Something about writing this letter closes the gap between these disparate places I call home. I write to you about home, about our communities. I write to identify a per-sistent trend in research on Native communities, city communities, and other disenfranchised communities—what I call damage-centered research. I invite you to join me in re-visioning research in our communities not only to recog-nize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken. This is an open letter addressed to educational researchers and practi-tioners concerned with fostering and maintaining ethical relationships with disenfranchised and dispossessed communities and all of those troubled by the possible hidden costs of a research strategy that frames entire communi-ties as depleted.
The governance of emerging science and innovation is a major challenge for contemporary democracies. In this paper we present a framework for understanding and supporting efforts aimed at ‘responsible innovation’. The framework was developed in part through work with one of the first major research projects in the controversial area of geoengineering, funded by the UK Research Councils. We describe this case study, and how this became a location to articulate and explore four integrated dimensions of responsible innovation: anticipation, reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness. Although the framework for responsible innovation was designed for use by the UK Research Councils and the scientific communities they support, we argue that it has more general application and relevance.
Taking number as material and semiotic, this article considers the enumeration of Australia’s water resources as both a form of audit and a form of marketing. It proposes that a scientific enumeration utilizes the relation one/many while an economic enumeration utilizes the relation whole/parts. Working the tension between these two forms of enumeration can be understood as an inventive frontier in contemporary Australian life.
The economic imperatives of neoliberalism combined with the technologies of New Public Management have wrought profound changes in the organization of the workplace in many contemporary capitalist societies. Calculative practices including `performance indicators' and `benchmarking' are increasingly being used to measure and reform public sector organizations and improve the productivity and conduct of individuals across a range of professions. These processes have resulted in the development of an increasingly pervasive `audit culture', one that derives its legitimacy from its claims to enhance transparency and accountability. Drawing on examples from the UK, particularly the post-1990s' reform of universities, this article sets out to analyse the origins and spread of that audit culture and to theorize its implications for the construction of academic subjectivities. The questions I ask are: How are these technologies of audit refashioning the working environment and what effects do they have on behaviour (and subjectivity) of academics? What does the analysis of the rise of managerialism tell us about wider historical processes of power and change in our society? And why are academics seemingly so complicit in, and unable to challenge, these audit processes?
It will be argued that false numbers in working documents, formulae, and business plans are used as temporary or conditional devices to enable rationalization. The social processes of creating formalized practices depend upon activities that are themselves conditional and ephemeral. That is, rather than subvert the ostensible purpose of fixed representation, false numbers make stability and fixity in representation possible. Examples used include business forecasting, property tax assessments, and the introduction of accounting into cooperative agriculture in Stalinist Hungary.
Using the case of Cobalt, a former silver mining town in Northern Ontario, Canada, we trace the transition from social funding as a feature of the welfare state to social funding based on application, adjudication and award. We identify a process in the community development arena, whereby local governments, community organizations and commu-nity members are increasingly enmeshed in the bureaucratic and socially disengaging processes of proposal-writing. Cobalters regard aspects of this downward deflection of the locus of economic responsibility as fairer, and more transparent, than the previous funding regime. We show how a local moral economy and understanding of citizenship based on an ethic of caring has contributed, in a counterintuitive way, to an interim outcome of more public services. At the same time, the current pursuit of development funds via proposal is undermining the practices of civic engagement which have allowed the town to remain distinct for the past century. During the 2006 August long weekend residents and visitors to Cobalt, Ontario (2006 census, pop. 1229) celebrated the 100th anniversary of the town's incorpo-ration. This centennial fete, built into the annual four-day Miner's Festival, was the second celebration of the town's centennial. The first, which occurred three years earlier, commemorated the discovery of the silver and coincided with Parks Canada's designation of the town site as a national historic district. The 2003 celebration was recalled as quite a shindig, and in the weeks leading up to the sequel, several of the festival organizers worried aloud that the current festivities would not measure up to the earlier ones either in size or degree of revelry.
The article reviews two decades of scholars' claims that exposures to pollution and other environmental risks are unequally distributed by race and class, examines case studies of environmental justice social movements and the history and politics of environmental justice policy making in the United States, and describes the emerging issue of global climate justice. The authors engage the contentious literature on how to quantitatively measure and document environmental injustice, especially the complex problems of having data of very different types and areas (such as zip codes, census tracts, or concentric circles) around polluting facilities or exposed populations. Also considered is the value of perspectives from critical race theory and ethnic studies for making sense of these social phenomena. The article concludes with a discussion of the globalization of the environmental justice movement, discourse, and issues, as well as with some policy implications of finding and understanding environmental justice. One unique feature of this review is its breadth and diversity, given the different approaches taken by the three coauthors.
Many ethnographers feel the pressure to suspend familial and professional ties to separate “the field” from “home” for prolonged periods. Since 2019, we have been developing the concept of “patchwork ethnography” to spotlight how ethnographers conduct fieldwork amid intersecting personal and professional responsibilities. We interrogate how researchers’ personal lives impact the process of knowledge production, showcase the innovations that have stemmed from efforts to balance multiple commitments, and advocate for writing with rather than against the disruptions that might characterize anthropological research projects. As a discipline that centers reflexivity, anthropology provides the tools to rethink not only our discipline's research practices but also those of other social sciences. Drawing on the discipline's strengths, patchwork ethnography unlocks anthropology's potential to further expand what theory means and who can be considered a theorist.
Public institutions have increasingly responded to calls for more accountability by promoting ideas of data-driven governance. As this focus on using data tools to strengthen governance intensifies, it is important to examine how the tools that underlie such claims are made. In the context of US agri-environmental policy, policy leadership has spoken the language of data-driven decision-making for over thirty years, primarily in response to accountability demands. However, the reliance on metrics and calculation is most explicit in the newest initiative called the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP). Unlike other initiatives, the CSP used a single environmental scoring and decision-making algorithm to allocate approximately US$3.8 billion to 68,000 farmers. Applying a Social Construction of Technology approach to the development of the tool shows that different social groups – political aides, program officials, and subject-matter specialists – interpreted data-driven governance differently. Tool design emerges not despite but through the contestations over the purpose and practicality of doing data-driven governance. Social groups involved in tool development are themselves embedded in different accountability structures that shape the rationalities they marshal when negotiating practical decisions about tool design. The final tool used in the CSP was technically contested and the tool development process was poorly documented, yet it had an important legitimacy function: it deflected accountability pressures for more rationalization in public spending without causing major policy disruption. Centering analysis on the negotiations entailed in making the tools that come to underlie claims of data-driven governance can explain how and to what extent a push for more data in public policy can strengthen (and weaken) accountability relations.
Multiple stakeholders—ranging from regulators and developers to customer and community advocates—have roles to play in the transition to an equitable energy system. Metrics are an emerging area of importance for the operationalization of energy equity as they may guide investment and policy decisions that shape the energy system along this transition. This paper aims to advance energy equity metrics for use in regulation, planning, and operations of the electricity system within the United States. Metrics were surveyed from the literature and distilled to a set that identifies which stakeholders may be associated with which metrics. Established tenets of energy justice—distributive, procedural, recognition, restorative—were also identified for each metric, providing a link between energy equity in study and in practice. This means of organization is intended to enable discussion and collaboration among stakeholders, as the objectives embodied in energy equity metrics are often beyond the control of individual stakeholders. Further stakeholder discussion is necessary to determine which metrics are practicable, who will use them, and how they will be used to support energy equity.
What are corporations, and to whom are they responsible? The author draws on two years of research at Newmont Mining Corporation's Denver headquarters and its Batu Hijau copper and gold mine in Sumbawa, Indonesia, to address these questions. Against the backdrop of an emerging Corporate Social Responsibility movement and changing state dynamics in Indonesia, the book shows how people enact the mining corporation in multiple ways: as an ore producer, employer, patron, promoter of sustainable development, religious sponsor, auditable organization, foreign imperialist, and environmental threat. Rather than assuming that corporations are monolithic, profit-maximizing subjects, the author turns to anthropological theories of personhood to develop an analytic model of the corporation as an unstable collective subject with multiple authors, boundaries, and interests. This book demonstrates that corporations are constituted through continuous struggles over relations with—and responsibilities to—local communities, workers, activists, governments, contractors, and shareholders.
This paper presents a quantitative framework to support policy decision-making around equitable energy interventions. By combining sociodemographic and techno-economic models in the energy space, we propose a linear programming model to calculate the optimal portfolio of energy investments that explicitly minimizes the energy burden of a given population of energy insecure households. The model is formulated as a multi-objective optimization suitable to support the decisions on weatherization and deployment of distributed energy resources. We illustrate our methodology with a case study involving a population of 14,043 energy insecure households in Wayne County, Detroit, United States.
In 2013, the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) attempted to initiate a consent-based siting (CBS) approach to better engage diverse publics and thereby begin to remedy a legacy of technocratic decision-making and inequitable public engagement processes plaguing historical high-level nuclear waste siting efforts. DOE's remediation work included a contract with the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network to employ participatory technology assessment (pTA) to help co-create the CBS process with lay publics. In late 2016, the DOE terminated the process to develop a CBS process. To date, little in the public record explores DOE's novel foray into CBS. As researchers on DOE's aborted ECAST efforts, we situate the novel pTA process to create a CBS process amidst the technocratic political-historical context of commercial nuclear waste siting in the U.S. Lessons from ECAST's effort highlight persistent institutional barriers inhibiting U.S. capacity to more equitably approach the challenge of siting nuclear waste facilities. We identify the undermining consequences of DOE's focus on expediency; imposed limitations on the scope of CBS; bureaucratic obstacles to public input; a lack of continuity in values across executive administrations; and absence of top-level commitment to procedural and institutional learning, innovation, and adaptation. Through our case history and critical reflection, we aim to inform future efforts in the U.S. and beyond to overcome failed technocratic histories and instead steward participatory, equitable, and democratic processes to manage high-level nuclear waste.
How engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries attempt to reconcile competing domains of public accountability.
The growing movement toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) urges corporations to promote the well-being of people and the planet rather than the sole pursuit of profit. In Extracting Accountability, Jessica Smith investigates how the public accountability of corporations emerges from the everyday practices of the engineers who work for them. Focusing on engineers who view social responsibility as central to their profession, she finds the corporate context of their work prompts them to attempt to reconcile competing domains of accountability—to formal guidelines, standards, and policies; to professional ideals; to the public; and to themselves. Their efforts are complicated by the distributed agency they experience as corporate actors: they are not always authors of their actions and frequently act through others.
Drawing on extensive interviews, archival research, and fieldwork, Smith traces the ways that engineers in the mining and oil and gas industries accounted for their actions to multiple publics—from critics of their industry to their own friends and families. She shows how the social license to operate and an underlying pragmatism lead engineers to ask how resource production can be done responsibly rather than whether it should be done at all. She analyzes the liminality of engineering consultants, who experienced greater professional autonomy but often felt hamstrung when positioned as outsiders. Finally, she explores how critical participation in engineering education can nurture new accountabilities and chart more sustainable resource futures.
Carbon markets are the primary regulatory device for confronting climate change. This article analyzes the data practices through which carbon markets connect local reductions in carbon emissions with the planetary atmosphere as such. Carbon markets and related accounting practices are a special form of what Kim Fortun calls “informating environmentalism,” that is, the rendering of environmental issues into problems that can be managed by information systems. I explore the manufacture of carbon offsets (a kind of financial product) through two companies in Thailand who reduce carbon emissions from agricultural processing factories. Criticism of carbon markets may not recognize their importance if it ignores the information practices through which they are made and global problems to which they are addressed. The study of “Earth's data” helps emphasize the anthropological significance of carbon markets. Specifically, carbon regulation seeks to ensure Earth's future habitability by managing the chemical composition of the planetary atmosphere. [ climate change, carbon markets, information infrastructure, global assemblage, planetary atmosphere, chemistry, quantification, Thailand ]
Does anthropology have more to offer than just its texts? In this timely and remarkable book, Stuart Kirsch shows how anthropology can-and why it should-become more engaged with the problems of the world. Engaged Anthropology draws on the author's experiences working with indigenous peoples fighting for their environment, land rights, and political sovereignty. Including both short interventions and collaborations spanning decades, it recounts interactions with lawyers and courts, nongovernmental organizations, scientific experts, and transnational corporations. This unflinchingly honest account addresses the unexamined "backstage" of engaged anthropology. Coming at a time when some question the viability of the discipline, the message of this powerful and original work is especially welcome, as it not only promotes a new way of doing anthropology, but also compellingly articulates a new rationale for why anthropology matters.
In 2013, Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa announced the end of the Yasuní-ITT initiative. The initiative had proposed to combat climate change by not exploiting oil reserves in one section of the Yasuní National Park. Anticipating outcry, Correa promised that operations would affect less than one thousandth of the park, or “menos del uno por mil.” This article examines the role of numerical calculations in the governance of subterranean resources. Numbers do a particular kind of labor to rationalize the shift contained in the Yasuní-ITT initiative that rhetoric alone does not. Metrics such as el uno por mil constitute and translate between diverse realms of value. Yet, contrary to the assumption that numbers are derived from strictly technical, expert processes, I show how such metrics are fundamental to translations between incalculable matters of nature, the future, and the “good” when deployed in contests over the effects of oil on life.
In this article, I focus on carbon capture and storage (CCS), a controversial climate change mitigation technology that operates by collecting carbon dioxide from point sources and depositing it in underground locations, such as depleting oil reservoirs. Specifically, I investigate the ways in which certain CCS professionals imagine and demand a reconceptualization of carbon dioxide: not as waste or as dangerous material that should be taxed and exchanged in carbon markets, but as a neutral gas that can be bought and sold as a commodity, and perhaps used as a drilling additive for the oil and gas industry. CCS professionals suggest that carbon dioxide has multiple legal, political, and chemical meanings and existences across different points on a CCS network, and they acknowledge how this condition makes it difficult to produce the molecule as a commodity characterized by exchange and commensurability. In studying the commodification of carbon dioxide, I show how these professionals do not intend to create "sameness" across the market, but instead wish to commodify the molecule through "linking" various versions of carbon dioxide together. By tracking carbon dioxide as it moves within a CCS network, I explore the moral logics of CCS technologies, which obscure how energy-intensive models of life triggered climate change in the first place.
Anthropologists since the 1990s have paid greater attention to the state and governmentality than to one of the most consequential forms of power in our time, the corporation. The lack of attention to corporations is especially problematic when the harm they cause is readily apparent and substantial. We propose to reorient the study of power in anthropology to focus on the strategies corporations use in response to their critics and how this facilitates the perpetuation of harm. We identify three main phases of corporate response to critique: denial, acknowledgement and token accommodation, and strategic engagement. In case studies of the tobacco and mining industries, we show how corporate responses to their critics protect these industries from potential delegitimization and allow them to continue operating in favorable regulatory environments. Finally, we connect these corporate strategies to pervasive feelings of discontent about the present and the perceived inability to change the future. Although corporations usually benefit from the politics of resignation, we argue that widespread dissatisfaction with corporate practices represents an important starting point for social change.
This paper proposes some new ways of analysing the exercise of political power in advanced liberal democratic societies. These are developed from Michel Foucault's conception of ‘governmentality’ and addresses political power in terms of ‘political rationalities’ and ‘technologies of government’. It draws attention to the diversity of regulatory mechanisms which seek to give effect to government, and to the particular importance of indirect mechanisms that link the conduct of individuals and organizations to political objectives through ‘action at a distance’. The paper argues for the importance of an analysis of language in understanding the constitution of the objects of politics, not simply in terms of meaning or rhetoric, but as ‘intellectual technologies’ that render aspects of existence amenable to inscription and calculation. It suggests that governmentality has a characteristically ‘programmatic’ form, and that it is inextricably bound to the invention and evaluation of technologies that seek to give it effect. It draws attention to the complex processes of negotiation and persuasion involved in the assemblage of loose and mobile networks that can bring persons, organizations and objectives into alignment. The argument is exemplified through considering various aspects of the regulation of economic life: attempts at national economic planning in post-war France and England; the role ascribed to changing accounting practices in the UK in the 1960s; techniques of managing the internal world of the workplace that have come to lay special emphasis upon the psychological features of the producing subjects. The paper contends that ‘governmentality’ has come to depend in crucial respects upon the intellectual technologies, practical activities and social authority associated with expertise. It argues that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized through expertise, are key resources for governing in a liberal-democratic way.
For the social theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, measurement, quantification and calculation were of particular social and political significance. Karl Marx, in Capital, based his critique of classical political economy on an analysis of the quantification of labour as a commodity. Max Weber, in Economy and Society, emphasized the importance of rational calculation in the conduct of modern bureaucratic organizations. And in his major work, The Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel highlighted what he called ‘the calculating character of modern times'.
This essay describes the development of information technology and culture in the environmental field since the 1980s and how this has led to new understandings of risk communication. The essay also describes how environmental information systems operate as instruments of power, in the way they configure and provide access to knowledge, in the way they manage uncertainty, and in the way they build in and project particular modes of subjectivity. The goal is to provide a brief yet compelling glimpse into the "informating of environmentalism."
This paper locates the EPA national headquarters within the racialized local geography of southwest Washington, D.C. By focusing on the formation of a scientist union and the union's struggle to make visible an episode of chemical exposure in its own offices, the paper connects the work of racialized privilege with the difficulty of proving chemical exposures in the 1980s.
This review essay considers the relations between quantification and democratic government. Previous studies have demonstrated that the relation between numbers and politics is mutually constitutive: the exercise of politics depends upon numbers; acts of social quantification are politicized; our images of political life are shaped by the realities that statistics appear to disclose. The essay explores the specific links between democracy, as a mentality of government and a technology of rule, and quantification, numeracy and statistics. It argues that democratic power is calculated power, calculating power and requiring citizens who calculate about power. The essay considers the links between the promulgation of numeracy in eighteenth-century U.S. and programmes to produce a certain type of disciplined subjectivity in citizens. Some aspects of the history of the census are examined to demonstrate the ways in which the exercise of democratic government in the nineteenth century came to be seen as dependent upon statistical knowledge and the role that the census had in “making up” the polity of a democratic nation. It examines the case of National Income Accounting in the context of an argument that there is an intrinsic relation between political problematizations and attempts to make them calculate through numerical technologies. And it considers the ways in which neo-liberal mentalities of government depend upon the existence of a public habitat of numbers, upon a population of actors who calculate and upon an expertise of number. Democracy, in its modern mass liberal forms, requires numerate and calculating citizens, numericized civic discourse and a numericized programmatics of government.
The crucial role of just process for equitable industrial decarbonization: An Action Research agenda for carbon management and other emerging technologies. Paper at NASEM workshop, Developing and Assessing Ideas for Social and Behavioral
- J Hirsch
- K Jalbert
- L Keeler
- O Connell
- L K Roberts
- D-L Smith