Resigned reductionism: Reconceptualising digital imaginaries of automated natural capital

• Practitioners are adopting new digital automated natural capital (ANC) tools. • Analysing ANC imaginaries finds that the tool reproduces ontological reductionisms. • Stakeholders express resignation to the ontologically reductive nature of ANC. • Resigned reductionism is premised upon attracting support for nature recovery. • Resigned reductionism may legitimise inaction and discourage wider transformation. Natural capital accounting is widely adopted in the UK as a means of supporting environmental measurement and management, with digital automation technologies increasingly shaping its practice. Natural capital approaches have been critiqued by geographers for being ontologically reductive and for over-privileging certain technocratic knowledges. Nevertheless, this analysis can overlook environmental practitioners’ awareness of and attempts to address these critiques. This paper therefore makes two interventions. It first analyses what it terms the Automated Natural Capital (ANC) imaginary, exploring how stakeholders involved in the development of an ANC tool articulate, experience and envision it. It finds that such tools are indeed founded upon functional relations with nature, failing to acknowledge alternative knowledges, whilst also black boxing the socio-political logics behind the choice of reductionist valuations. Secondly, however, it identifies how and why stakeholders working at a Scottish rewilding site resign themselves to ANC, deemed as necessary to channel attention and support to nature recovery. It conceptualises this as “resigned reductionism”, understood as affectively co-constituting the ANC imaginary. The paper ends by suggesting that resignation is bound up in promises of the future digital optimisation of ANC, which risks displacing transformational alternatives to an unrealised future. It therefore argues for the wider significance of this concept in contemporary environmental governance.