Short Abstract

What moves us toward green futures? This panel explores how environmental governance distributes benefits and harms unevenly across space and time, and how digital technologies mediate and reconfigure these spatiotemporal disjunctures across affective, material, and political dimensions.

Long Abstract

Global efforts towards a ‘green’ future are pursued through policies, infrastructures, technologies, markets, and conservation initiatives. Yet these efforts often distribute benefits and harms unevenly across space and time. Harms like pollution, loss, and displacement are not simply unintended consequences of ‘well-meant’ interventions: they are structurally embedded in environmental governance through processes of externalisation, prioritisation, and sacrifice. This panel explores these dynamics through the lens of spatiotemporal disjunctures: the spatial and temporal logics through which environmental governance differentially allocates benefits, harms, and responsibilities across geographies, temporalities, species, and social worlds.

Digital technologies are integral to these processes, shaping how environmental problems and solutions are framed, monitored, analysed, legitimised, and contested. Digital media can amplify visions of green futures, produce counternarratives, and shape whose harms and interests become visible and whose remain obscured. Geospatial technologies, to provide another example, can deliver data for destructive extractivism while also informing activism challenging it. Digital technologies thus operate as infrastructures, mediating environmental governance across affective, material, and political dimensions while also intensifying and reconfiguring spatiotemporal disjunctures through uneven access, visibility, attention, and urgency. The panel asks how environmental governance and its digital mediations redistribute benefits and harms across landscapes and temporalities. We invite ethnographic and theoretical contributions examining how these disjunctures are produced, experienced, narrated, contested, and reworked across diverse green futures and social worlds, involving disjunctures between, for instance, global and local priorities, immediate and deferred consequences, and visible and obscured harms, as well as within and between different forms of environmental communication.