‘The tool didn’t make decisions for us': metrics and the performance of accountability in environmental governance

ABSTRACT

Governments use metrics made possible by new data technologies to allocate budgets, manage pandemics, valorize ecosystems, and demonstrate how these actions are legitimate. Big data is pointed to as providing objective answers that emerge untampered from observations of the world as it is – a view from nowhere. While data is more valued than ever in environmental governance, so too are arrangements that seek stakeholders’ input and otherwise address their subjective interests – a view from everywhere. Different kinds of metrics perform state actors as accountable in both registers: metrics that are responsive to dynamic conditions; that account for specific stakeholders; that can be prioritized against one another in interactive data visualization tools. Louisiana, USA’s Coastal Master Plan is an attempt to stem wetlands loss through fine-scale modeling of large volumes of data and calculation of these kinds of social and environmental metrics. State actors there make accountability claims that appear contradictory: their decisions are legitimate because they are driven by the best available coastal science and technology, while their data tools ‘didn’t make decisions for us.’ As state actors deploy environmental big data and metrics to make sense of it, we should be able to explain these apparently contradictory stances and the controversies that result. STS theory on metrics in environmental governance benefits from characterizing how ‘modes of authorized seeing’ are given expression by different metrical forms and what brings modes into contact and conflict.

KEYWORDS:

• Metrics
• modeling
• accountability
• adaptation
• performativity
• Louisiana

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was originally presented at the 2018 Institute on Critical Studies of Environmental Governance in Toronto, Canada. I would like to thank the organizers of that event - Allison Loconto, Scott Prudham, and Steven Wolf – as well as fellow participants for their feedback. I am also grateful for the comments of several anonymous reviewers, who made invaluable suggestions for strengthening the paper. I appreciate the support of Allison Loconto in shepherding this paper through the publication process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Likewise, when I refer to the State, I mean the government of the State of Louisiana. I also write state planning apparatus to more explicitly reference CPRA as well as other entities involved in preparing the Master Plan, such as consultancies like RAND.

2 I do not assess whether metrics are ontologically more fact or more value because this is a false binary. As STS scholars have repeated, ‘making facts is making values is making arrangements that are in one way or another political’ (Law 2004, p. 2; cf. Haraway, 1991). Every measure is always a product of ‘matters of fact’ and ‘matters of concern’ (Latour 2004). The distinction between objective fact and subjective value does not actually exist because every number is a result of how research questions are framed, how they are selected in the first place, and what is deemed ‘nonknowledge’ (Jasanoff 2017). But given how operative this binary is in the world, I am interested in how metrics resonate in one rhetorical register or the other and to what end state actors mobilize those registers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric Nost

Eric Nost is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph and a member of the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. His research focuses on how data technologies inform environmental governance.