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Short abstract

This contribution reports on approaches to desiging and implementing better monitoring infrastructures. It highlights the value of STS to foreground and embed ethical dimensions of systematicity and reflexivity in monitoring projects on water quality, biodiversity and regenerative agriculture.

Long abstract

In addressing situations (often labelled crises) of biodiversity loss, land-use change, migration, climate change and mitigation, or fire management, monitoring has been a core epistemic strategy that feeds research, policy-making and management. A dominant dynamic of such monitoring is the abstraction and backgrounding of most relations, combined with rigid focus on repeatability and standardisation over time and across space. This results in discussions of what to count and how, where and when that are highly technical and appeal mainly to handfuls of experts who foreground their specialist knowledge and objectivity—so that knowledge infrastructures for monitoring do not become apolitical per se, but the politics are instantiated in systems of procedures, classifications, and standards. Yet such monitoring frameworks and practices also have the potential to mobilise publics and to connect actors eager to act. It is therefore essential to innovate monitoring approaches to serve as sites to attend to justice, equity and precarity, and as means to enhance transformative encounters and arts of noticing.

This contribution reports on the possibilities to develop better monitoring that embed ethical considerations in their design and implementation. In particular, the value of an STS toolbox to work towards foregrounding the ethical dimensions of systematicity (how knowledge is organised) and of reflexivity (the possibility of asking what is known) is highlighted. This potential is illustrated through interventions in processes of datafication, classifications, commensuration, and scaling that are central to monitoring projects on water quality, biodiversity and regenerative agriculture.