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Short abstract:

Can we simulate our way to sustainable energy futures with digital twins? I followed practitioners involved in digital twins initiatives to find out how they re-invent the notions of scale, truth, and policy advice using computational tools.

Long abstract:

Decarbonising energy systems involves addressing dilemmas between several public values, be it security, affordability, citizen engagement, or public health. What if we could model these dilemmas and anticipate sociotechnical impacts of building a new nuclear station, installation of solar panels on every roof, or a change in energy tariffs? Digital twins – usually defined as advanced virtual representations of social and physical processes and objects – promise to achieve that. As digital twins are still in the ‘demonstrator’ stage (Laurent, 2021), many questions arise about data accuracy, interoperability, security; required expertise, and, most importantly, the epistemic foundations of claims made by the twins.

This presentation investigates the sites of knowledge production related to digital twins of the energy industry, drawing from multi-sited ethnography (Hine, 2007) of relevant projects, government initiatives, and the researcher’s residence at the organisation developing a digital twin demonstrator for energy policy advice.

Thinking through a philosophy of science classic, Goodman’s “Ways of Worldmaking” (1978) as an analytical lens, the paper will investigate the making of multiple ‘scales’ produced by the digital twins. From timescales (e.g. real-time, right-time, forecasting, Coletta, 2020), spatial scales (e.g. resolution, accuracy), to politics of scaling (moving between grand ambitions to pilot projects, Pfotenhauer, 2022), I will explore to what extent digital twinning is a separate analytical category, distinct from modeling, simulations or evidence-based science. I will differentiate between the notions of ‘truth’ (e.g. ‘single source of truth’, ‘ground truth) and ‘rightness’ developed by diverse epistemic communities working with computational tools.

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Short abstract:

Based on a 2-year study of an online Swiss-based climate “hackathon,” that was founded by tech-startup entrepreneurs with the intention to bring agile and data driven methods to climate activism, we will look at what forms of power and conflict emerge when green and digital agendas come together.

Long abstract:

In the face of the consistent failure of our societies to implement swift and bold climate policy changes, more and more people — from various sectors and political backgrounds — are getting involved in initiatives that attempt to do something about the climate crisis. As a result, “unconventional bedfellows” (Latour and Schultz 2022), stakeholders and partners, often from different opposing groups or organizations unite for a specific climate action.

This paper is based on a 2-year study of an online Swiss-based climate “hackathon,” that was founded by tech-startup entrepreneurs with the intention to bring agile and data driven methods to climate activism, in the transport sector in particular. These “climate hackers” - from various political and geographic locations - come together weekly using a digital meeting space to invent practical technical “solutions” to climate problems. We investigate the ways in which the various startup practices and logics of the group transform environmental activism. In doing so, we hope to address the entanglements of the green and digital transitions in the transport sector in Switzerland specifically.

Here, we conceptualize the coming together of green and digital logics, or modes of value as alliance building across difference. By looking at the affordances and constraints of the digital infrastructure itself, we will look at how collaboration across difference actually looks like, what type of work is done in order for alliances to form and function (or not), and what forms of power and conflict emerge when green and digital agendas come together.

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Long abstract:

The so-called twin transition is the latest buzzword that has mushroomed in European Commission (EC) policy papers from the industrial strategy over pandemic recovery plans to zero-pollution plans. Since the European ‘Green Deal’ it evokes a narrative that envisions several wins: Not only do the green and digital transition mutually reinforce and support each other. Wherever they do, they are expected to increase the competitiveness of the EU, create new and sustainable (in a dual sense) jobs, and assure continuous economic growth.

Our contribution is situated in the framework of an ERC research project “Innovation Residues – modes and infrastructures of caring for our longue-durée environmental futures” (PI: Ulrike Felt, GA1010545) which critically engages with the coevolution of digitalization and environmental futures. Our analysis of twin transition discourse draws on policy papers from EC and member states, interviews with policy-makers, industry experts and civil society actors as well as on an ethnography of a data center conference.

On the one hand, we explore situated imaginaries of the twin transition. For Austria this lens reveals that it is embedded in a broader transition of state-ness where the state assumes centralized control over data. On the other hand, we focus on the realizations of these imaginaries. In Ireland this makes visible the way the twin transition serves as justification for an ever-growing data center industry which starts to encounter pushbacks from publics.

Both imaginaries and their realizations clearly open up the reading of the twin transition as a maladaptation to climate change.

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Long abstract:

Biodiversity is a complex concept and practice that differently assembles through policies, measurements, and community plans. This presentation draws on empirical data gathered from interviews, webinars and conferences, online meetings, project reports, and community-based fieldwork engaged with biodiversity. Focusing especially on biodiversity technologies that are predominantly developed and funded in northwest Europe, this research highlights how digital twins and their connected sensors and infrastructures omit the multidimensional and relational aspects of biodiversity. Digital twins are currently being developed through large-scale international funding programs that advance biodiversity as a technoscientific project. However, they overlook other crucial methods for creating knowledge about biodiversity. This paper articulates four digital logics that structure how biodiversity becomes monitored and understood within recent technological developments through intensified practices of capturing, connecting, simulating, and computing forested environments. While these ‘twinning’ logics drive advancements in predictive analytics and database creation, they also introduce constraints that may ultimately undermine the goals set forth by sustainability initiatives and governance. Lastly, this presentation contrasts these top-down developmental approaches with ongoing participatory fieldwork with a rural community in Netherlands to investigate how digital biodiversity data is used and gains meaning through simulation technologies in local settings. The paper thereby contributes more detailed insights into how digital biodiversity technologies can be rethought to better align with local biodiversity forest restoration efforts.

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Short abstract:

The paper applies the concept of Big and Little Futures to analyze how the twin transition of digital and environmental change take place in the context of waste management. The role of everyday practices and technologies in the enactment of Futures in a waste management organization is highlighted.

Long abstract:

Waste management, a classic environmental governance issue, is a field where the ‘twinning’ of the green and digital transition takes place. Digital technologies are seen by scientists and practitioners alike as tools to enable a circular economy, which aims to reduce the use of primary resources (e.g. metals, oil) and the amount of waste materials. Therefore, waste management seems an ideal field to explore the question of how and why the digital and the ecological transitions are connected.

Within our contribution we rely on the idea of Mike Michael (2017) and explore how the Big Futures of circular economy and digitization become Little Futures in the daily practices of waste collection, route planning, or dispatching within a municipal waste company in Germany. Different green and digital futures interact, connect and compete in daily practices of various actors such as waste collection workers, dispatchers and digitization project managers. Thus, sensor-based data gathering enables predictive maintenance and improves waste separation but also opens the debate on social scoring. Moreover, mundane objects notably digital devices such as tablets, sensors, but also digital infrastructures such as data management systems play a crucial role when it comes to enacting different futures.

We will present preliminary findings from our research and discuss, for example, how the grand narrative of the digital and green transition as interdependent and mutually beneficial alters, interacts and collides with existing organizational processes and the daily routines of waste collection workers in a municipal waste company and beyond.

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Long abstract:

As boundary term, sustainability forms a meeting point which brings together actors from various sectors and interest groups. As aspired policy goal in times of growing environmental degradation, it has gained significance in that new actors in policy, industry and civic societies have populated the term in conflicting and overlapping ways. This talk discusses the reform of the EU Common Agriculture Policy (CAP) in the light of the Green Deal to analyze in a first step a growing diversity of toolkits to achieve a European sustainable agriculture: low-input approaches, like agroecology, are placed next to more high-tech methods, such as precision farming or gene editing. This requires rendering all tools/approaches technical and scientific to make them legible in a technocratic setting like the European Commission. In a second step, the talk shows how such agricultural tools, in the form of ‘digital technology’, ‘innovation’ or ‘science,’ are imagined as glues that hold together the holy triad of sustainability – the ecological, the social, and the economic. This technocratic flattening of diverse farming philosophies and approaches also speaks to a vision and aspired goal of the EU as a political union, despite or perhaps exactly because of its diversity (of member states). Analyzing these diversity-toolkit politics, including how new actors both conform with and contest the technoscientific rendering of farming approaches, offers insights not only into how a new (agricultural) technoscientific sustainability is shaped, but also how it coheres to, and thus is coproduced with the EU as technocratic political union.

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Long abstract:

As part of its grand strategy, the European Green Deal, the European Commission has proposed a comprehensive Forest Monitoring Law (FM) representing a shift towards datafied environmental governance. This legislation aims to establish a unified framework for collecting and analyzing forest data, underscoring the EU's commitment to integrating digital technologies with environmental policy objectives. However, translating these green goals into digital means—through remote sensing and the Copernicus satellite program—raises critical questions about the nature of policy translation, the assemblage of technical and political elements, and the inherent tensions in digitalizing environmental stewardship.

Informed by the "politics of translation" (by Clark and others), this paper uses the FM as a focal point to analyse the nuanced process of translating policy goals into digital solutions. It explores how the FM synthesizes diverse components, such as data standards, interoperability, and emerging technologies, to create a cohesive response to environmental challenges. Furthermore, it scrutinizes the political disputes arising from this process, particularly the clash between environmental conservation, economic exploitation, and data sovereignty, highlighting member states' resistance to standardized EU monitoring due to concerns over national sovereignty and knowledge control.

Contributing to discussions on the intersection of the EU's digital and environmental strategies, this analysis underscores the need for a nuanced understanding of politics of translation. It advocates for a refined approach that recognizes the intricacies of aligning digital strategies with the Green Deal's objectives, spotlighting both the challenges and opportunities in navigating the digital environmental future.

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Long abstract:

The term “Twin Transition” starts to appear in EU policy documents in 2019 and is picking up speed since then, holding a prominent position in the NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Facility (NGEU/RRF). Promising nothing less than “building the EU back stronger” after the Covid-19 pandemic, the instrument stipulates that at least 20 percent of the funds should be invested in measures towards the pillar of “digital transformation” while at least 37 percent have to be allocated to the “green transition” pillar. In this contribution we ask how the perpetuated imaginary of the “Twin Transition”, as a coalition of the green and digital transition, is constructed. This should be investigated by examining two sites, where these imaginaries are produced and reproduced: policy making and technology development. First, we will present how the imaginary of the “Twin Transition” is shaped by EU policy discourse (with an emphasis on the NGEU/RRF and the Austrian plan). Second, we will show how these imaginaries are produced and reproduced by technology development, i.e. Austrian semiconductor firms. By conducting policy analyses, qualitative interviews and ethnographic field work, we want to show how the imaginary of the “Twin Transition” is constructed. From our research we are suggesting that by following a technosolutionist logic, the promise of the “Twin Transition” might get exposed as yet another “technological fix” for the climate crisis.

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Long abstract:

This paper aims to foreground the economic dimension of EU digital policymaking and its role in the ‘sovereigntist turn’. Indeed, digital sovereignty has become a central notion in EU digital strategy, often invoking imaginaries of being constrained and dominated by other actors. While this has been addressed in some of the scholarly literature on digital sovereignty, (e.g. Bellanova et al., 2022; Pohle and Thiel, 2020; Thumfart, 2022), it has not been sufficiently linked to neoliberal policymaking on a conceptual level. As such, the paper builds on the tracing and analysis of the ‘competitiveness’ discourse in the development of the digital strategy and policies of the EU. The analysis reveals the logic of competitiveness as central to digital policymaking and politics. Using the political theory of Hannah Arendt, it suggests treating competitiveness as a discourse of power that perpetuates a fundamentally modern conceptualization of agents and relations, and which is in tension with the EU’s newly proposed, more human-centered policymaking. Tracing this conceptualization also reveals a fundamental contradiction in the EU’s recent twinning of the digital and green transitions. Namely, if the gist of the EU’s digital politics lies in a desire to control and dominate others in the pursuit of the economic growth and competitiveness of EU businesses, then this contradicts the essence of the green transition, which would require that policymaking takes seriously the limits to economic growth. This would result in a shift in mindset towards less competitive and more co-operative modes of conceiving of politics.

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Long abstract:

This paper contributes to the literature that critically engages with the so-called “twin green and digital transition”. Our research question is: why and how is the twin transition discourse legitimised and implemented in the European Union (EU) despite recognised pitfalls and uncertainties? To address this question we apply a (1) theoretical approach that shows how technoscientific innovation, as imaginary, displays a hybrid character beyond modern distinctions between fact and values in EU governance discourse, and (2) an interpretative text analysis of EU policy documents on the “twin transition” and of Member States’ recovery and resilience plans. We first assess the historical, political and economic conditions which are constitutive of the meaning of the discourse, so it comes to be seen as desirable. We argue that digital technologies are invoked as imaginaries that transform and reframe tensions between economic and sustainability policy aims into synergies and win-win solutions. Legitimacy is derived not only from the promise of win-win solutions but also from the claimed ability of governing institutions to steer the twin transitions in the desired direction and avoid the recognised risks. With regard to implementation, the twin transition logic guided the allocation of funds by framing the need to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to accelerate the green and digital transitions. So, digital imaginary is central to the National Recovery and Resilience Plans. However, in the material practice, funding is directed to national interests that prioritize economic growth and strengthen the advancing of the European single market.