Presentation short abstract

Open data became an environmental management solution. But data misuse and misinterpretation can reinforce surveillance, extraction and conflict with subaltern groups. We examine the role of non-humans and data access/storage restriction across collaboration between indigenous groups and scientists.

Presentation long abstract

To what extent can remote sensing technology and data infrastructures reorganize and recontextualize environmental conflicts and subjects anew? We are witnessing a push by governments, industry sectors and scientific fields towards the mandate for free data streams, open access, and transparency. The open data mandate has become prominent in land use and environmental management and politics, where more information is conflated with efficient solutions. However, digital data can also generate new conflicts, and paradoxically reinforce logics of appropriation, extraction, and enclosure. Indigenous, peasant, and subaltern groups increasingly point to possible negative consequences of sharing and opening access to data generated about their culture, livelihoods and territoriality. Among other things, data integration and analysis methods can lead to data misinterpretation and illicit political misuse. In this paper, we bring political ecology approaches on environmental conflicts and commons together with Science and Technology Studies (STS) work on digital infrastructures and critical data studies to analyze precision monitoring and data production of lichen cover deployed by ecology scientists working with Sami herders in Sweden since the early 2000’s, as a mediation in the ongoing conflict between reindeer pastoralism and forestry. Based on ethnographic collaboration with ecology scientists, we enquire the role of non-humans (lichen, pinus plantation, reindeer) and the material limitations to storage and access designed in the data infrastructure to explore how data production and interpretations can be contested, and how these matters for future reindeer herding.