Geography and Environmental Governance I: Governing with Environmental Data

New data technologies abound in environmental politics. It is promised that these technologies will make the task of managing human impacts on the environment faster, easier, and more rational. Geographers have been among those eyeing this turn critically, illuminating how new data technologies are performing new environmental entities and scales of equivalence that become subject to political attention and dispute. The pulling of data through centralised infrastructure then adds layers of social judgement, as data are cleaned, formatted, and categorised to support the aims of the infrastructure's owners and managers. Throughout this process, the political economy of measurement – the idea that more measurement is a necessary precondition for more effective environmental decision making – acquires hegemony as political actors organise themselves around the politics of data and its control. With the environmental data turn reorganising the bases of environmental governance, geographical work is illuminating what is at stake and how these shifts can be engaged politically.