Conference Agenda

Scholars are increasingly aware of how emerging technologies have been changing (or disrupting?) the social fabric of life, both in the global North and South, in political, economic, and cultural realms. Digital technologies in particular have been a focus of attention. Digitalization has introduced positive dimensions to humankind's evolution, as has happened with technologies such as fire, language, and agriculture. However, digitalization has also sparked negative dimensions. Research has found that it is associated with: (i) alienation of poor people, particularly in the global South (e.g., ridesharing drivers tend to support far-right politics in countries like Brazil and Indonesia); (ii) racism, reproducing colonialist and misogynist logic of decision-making (e.g., facial recognition technologies trained with data from Western white males); (iii) propelling new logics of accumulation, extraction, and discrimination (e.g., low-to-mid-skilled workers threatened to be excluded from the job market by AI).

Taking this process as a background, this panel brings light to how digitalization is affecting global environmental governance. To date, few scholars have taken this avenue, mostly addressing the potential of technology to improve environmental governance through techno-fixes, satellite imagery, or Nature 4.0 solutions. Yet, there has been a limited emphasis on how digital technologies might negatively impact global sustainability governance, either influencing practical, political, and personal worldviews and decision-making toward environmentally conservative directions or pushing new arenas of socio-environmental exploitation, discrimination, and unsustainable growth. Thus, this panel proposes a critical discussion on techno-driven sustainability governance, including its transformative potential to drive inclusive, participatory, and bottom-up environmental governance, but emphasizing, in particular, the challenges and limitations for that.

• What is the transformative potential of digital technologies to foster participatory models of sustainability governance?
• Which technologies might help vulnerable and minority peoples to protect their ways of life, community-based knowledge, local food, and productive systems, improving socio-ecological relations with nature?

The 4th Industrial Revolution brought about a new agricultural paradigm called ‘Agriculture 4.0’, which is primarily characterized by the widespread use of digital resources. Critical scholarship has drawn attention to how such developments intensify industrial agriculture’s concentration of power across food systems and the challenges this poses for environmental governance. While this is certainly the case, efforts to document and explore how family-based agriculture has also been using digital technologies have received far less attention. This paper analyzes how the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil has adopted digital technologies to further its struggle for Popular Agrarian Reform (PAR) through reforestation and sustainable food production. Proponents of PAR strive to go beyond the classic notion of agrarian reform, mostly centered on access to land, towards the production of healthy foods and the promotion of sustainable practices more broadly. In pursuit of such goals, since 2021, MST has encouraged members to use an app called Arvoredo (see mst.org.br/2021/02/10/conheca-o-arvoredo-o-app-do-mst/) to record tree planting, agroforestry, the construction of nurseries and seed collection efforts, in addition to various formative and activist activities. We document MST’s use of Arvoredo and explore the app’s challenges and opportunities in furthering RAP as part of transformative environmental governance in agriculture. This hypothesis-generating case study is informed by interviews with 10 MST leaders from across different regions of Brazil. We find that Arvoredo has proved to be an important tool in producing and mobilizing spatialized knowledge of MST’s struggle to implement RAP. Yet, precarious internet access and difficulties in handling the app impede widespread adoption and greater effectiveness. In drawing attention to the potential of digital agriculture beyond the sole focus on industrial agriculture we seek to expand the scope of critical inquiry toward the use of digital technologies for emancipatory and ecological ends. MST’s experience with Arvoredo illustrates the benefits of digital agriculture for small-scale and family-based farming beyond the dominance of digital agriculture. Such an approach furthers our collective understanding of the complex dynamics among agriculture, land use, digital technologies, and environmental governance.

When does technology and specifically automation hinder state capacity? There is growing scholarly attention to how digital technologies, and especially automation, interrupt political processes and state activities. The consensus is that technology is a double-edged sword, equally capable of promoting development, or in the wrong hands, strengthening authoritarianism. Still, it remains unclear under what conditions digital technology adoption like automated monitoring can lead to negative outcomes. This paper investigates the conditions under which technology adoption undermines state capacity by using the case of automated satellite enforcement of the Amazon Rainforest. In brief, I find this digital technology generally failed to reduce deforestation rates and has instead led to state-societal tensions and reduced state capacity. By comparing the cases of rainforest management in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia along with over 30 interviews with elites and NGO actors, I analyze the case of satellite technology adoption from the 1990s until 2020. By leveraging the socio-political differences and variation in state capacity in each country, this paper demonstrates that the same factors led to similar outcomes. In each country, satellite monitoring led to enhanced knowledge of illegal activities, but failed to translate into significant reductions in the rate of deforestation. This technology also garnered political backlashes by local populations and powerful interest groups. I present a novel argument to explain these results. Specifically, I argue that two factors explain the similar outcomes in Brazil, Peru, and Colombia: a) understaffing and inefficient distributions of state agents/bureaucrats, and b) a lack of companion changes to legal systems. For factor a), I argue that in the case of Peru and Colombia, a lack of bureaucrats and agents meant satellite monitoring had limited on-the-ground impact. In Brazil, which is better staffed with agents, the state did not efficiently distribute its agents and inadvertently moved areas of impunity deeper into the Amazon. For factor b), the three countries - especially Brazil and Colombia - did not train judges to understand this technology and also failed to resolve long-standing legal disputes of land ownership which complicated the effectiveness of satellite monitoring in the judicial system. My argument and findings point to the risks of digital technology adoption by highlighting the embedded nature of state capacity. Changes in technology need companion and adequate changes in human labor and legal systems to be effective.

The global political arena is becoming more fragmented and disputed as regards climate governance. States and markets have deployed distinct methods to advance this agenda (multilateral, plurilateral, and bilateral negotiations, carbon markets, renewable energy technologies, nature-based solutions, etc.), yet the climate crisis is far from being solved and has become more acute. Moreover, climate justice literature has pointed out that climate governance has not only been ineffective, but also problematic when it comes to issues of equity, justice, and participation. Recently, scholars have delved into the potential of digitalization to tackle these challenges, for instance, low-carbon technologies, business-society coalitions, and online platforms to strengthen participatory climate governance. Big Tech firms have been key in these developments. For example, Alphabet’s Nest Renew provides a service for thermostats that makes it easier to support clean energy at home, and Meta’s Climate Science Information Center helps share information about the impacts of climate change, aiming to strengthen climate action, while Apple’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative propose to merge the racial equity with climate justice debates across its businesses. Yet, so far, few scholarly works have investigated the transformative potential of these initiatives, particularly for making climate governance more effective, participatory and diverse. Contributing to this debate, our research has focused on how four Big Tech firms (Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com, Apple Inc., and Meta Platforms, Inc.) have been framing digitalization as a transformative driver for low-carbon development, and which vested interests are involved in that. What kinds of green technologies and initiatives have these firms introduced to tackle climate change? Which vested interests and economic dimensions are involved? How do these firms advocate for the transformative potential of their technologies toward more participatory and diverse climate governance? To address these questions, we conducted seven months of field research in Silicon Valley/USA, participant observations in meetings of local NGO Citizens Climate Lobby, visited some of these firms’ headquarters and performed semi-structured interviews with data scientists, software engineers, and energy and sustainability analysts. Secondly, we collected primary documents from these firms (Diversity & Inclusion Reports and Sustainability Reports) covering 6 years (2016 - 2021). Such data were subject to qualitative interpretation and in-depth reflection on the potential and, particularly, the flaws and vested interests ingrained in these firms' discourses and practices towards climate governance. Our results advance the argument that the “digitalization of climate governance” provides only very limited, not transformative, solutions to climate change

From the late 20^th Century, Brazilian agriculture underwent a profound transformation towards industrialized agricultural production models which spread throughout most of the country’s interior. This development dramatically raised outputs and external revenues, but also spurred a broad array of sustainability challenges. This process of technical modernization, without corresponding social inclusion, became known as “Conservative Modernization” as it perpetuated exclusionary historical models of rural development. In response to domestic and international critique mainly directed towards the climate and biodiversity impact of large-scale agricultural production, Brazilian agriculture has gradually begun to incorporate a range of production changes with the potential to significantly lower its environmental footprint. However, while technological innovations and the capital-intensive nature of Brazilian agribusiness may provide the means to substantially improve its environmental performance, the sector appears much less capable of spurring rural social inclusion. This raises the need to critically scrutinize the application of low-carbon technologies within Brazilian agriculture in order to assess the wider socio-economic repercussions. In this paper, we specifically focus on the implementation of AI with the goal of spurring sustainable transformation through innovations such as precision agriculture, soil sensor application, pasture restoration, carbon flow measurements, and monetization, as well as big data processing and weather and climate modeling. We ask whether digital technologies can improve rural livelihoods, or whether they should be viewed as the latest step in a continuous process of exclusionary Brazilian rural development with technological innovations mainly benefitting large-scale operations, akin to a sort of “Green Conservative Modernization”.

In order to answer the overarching question regarding whether “sustainable AIs” are fundamentally distinct from a contemporary process of Green Conservative Modernization, the paper addresses a range of important questions related to the political economy of AI within Brazilian agriculture.

• Can AI applications for low-carbon agriculture spur labor inclusion and local income generation?
• Are the technologies and production models based on AI accessible to less capitalized operations?
• To which extent do traders and seed giants dominate Ag-tech production chains within the field of AI in Brazil?
• Which players define the technological path dependency of Ag-tech AI development in Brazil?

The paper treats these questions through a meta-analysis of existing literature supplemented by expert interviews. The aim is to conduct a broad discussion of structural trends of technological evolution/application, and their social reverberations.