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Infrastructures of environmental governance
Author(s) -
Taber Peter
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
anthropology today
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.419
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-8322
pISSN - 0268-540X
DOI - 10.1111/1467-8322.12393
Subject(s) - environmental governance , scholarship , corporate governance , work (physics) , politics , sociology of scientific knowledge , intervention (counseling) , sociology , environmental studies , environmental ethics , political science , environmental resource management , environmental planning , business , social science , engineering , geography , law , economics , mechanical engineering , psychology , philosophy , finance , psychiatry
To the extent that environmental governance aspires to be based on positive knowledge of what ‘the environment’ consists of and how it functions, programmes of environmental management must find ways to study it. This article draws on scholarship on knowledge infrastructures to examine a trajectory of scientific work in Ecuador focused on biodiversity and the recent uptake of this infrastructure for the study of climate change. When combined with an appreciation for the character of power and knowledge in modern institutions, analyses of experts’ ‘infrastructure work’ elucidate how environmental problems take shape as objects of expert intervention at the level of concrete, technical practices. Incorporating scientific infrastructure within the ambit of environmental anthropology can help us to understand the shape of environmental politics to come.