From records to actions: mediating civic data and environmental activism in Taiwan

This article reconceptualizes environmental data activism as situated practices that mediate actions through data infrastructures and translation. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and document analysis of two environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in Taiwan and their collaborations with civic-tech communities, we identify three key roles of ENGOs in environmental data activism: (1) extracting and infrastructuring datasets; (2) translating and re-embedding data into everyday practices through digital tools such as mobile apps and crowdsourcing games; (3) and mediating between different social actors in data activism. Hence, we theorize ENGOs as civic data intermediaries that turn open data into civic data infrastructures. We further identify contingent civic alliances in data activism. These are volunteer-driven collaborations that are generative yet precarious, producing episodic surges of both innovation and breakdown. This article argues that the value of data emerges not from purity of measurement but from socio-technical work that renders data publicly usable and criticizable. Conceptually, the research advances a practice-based theory of data justice as infrastructural work, showing how civic groups convert data from records into connected actions in everyday activism. From this perspective, the limits of justice are set as much by the labor of maintenance, temporal rhythms, and alliance fragility as by the epistemic accuracy of data.