Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

The paper examines Mumbai's unfinished sewage infrastructure and aims to deepen the understanding of how infrastructural ‘delays’ are lived. Drawing on post-developmental frameworks, I provide empirical insights into the lived realities of infrastructural delays. Challenging linear infrastructure development, I apply the concept of unfinishedness to reveal improvised arrangements that emerge through gaps arising from prolonged delays. By reading policy documents in conjunction with interviews with key stakeholders, including professionals working on/with sewage in Mumbai, I demonstrate how sewage infrastructure remains perpetually unfinished – always in the process but never reaching the presumed end goal defined within the policies. I supplement this with a case study of the Bhimnagar basti to understand how long periods of waiting are lived. These show the neighbourhood improvisations that emerge around unfinished systems over time. Thinking through Bhimnagar, I offer a close reading of how the city is influenced by and shapes itself around unfinished infrastructure, revealing the arrangements that emerge through everyday processes of inhabitation.

Upholding Tribal sovereignty in land use decision making is an ongoing challenge, in part because Tribal sacred sites, cultural heritage sites, and other cultural resources exist in areas outside of Tribal jurisdiction. In 2014, California Assembly Bill 52 (AB 52) amended the California Environmental Quality Act to mandate Tribal consultation as part of environmental reviews. AB 52 creates a mechanism for Tribal consultation on a per-project basis and gives Tribes decision making authority where Tribal Cultural Resources (TCRs) are concerned, even when TCRs are located off-reservation. This study offers the first statewide evaluation of AB 52 consultation from Tribal and agency perspectives. Using two surveys, one with Tribal respondents (n = 46) and one with agency respondents (n = 56), we assessed the ongoing processes of Tribal consultation between Tribal and local governments around cannabis permitting. Focusing on AB 52 in cannabis permitting provides a lens for evaluating Tribal consultation and TCR protection more generally. Our study shows that AB 52 is not consistently applied in land use decision making and that it faces several barriers to implementation. We discuss these findings and suggest how environmental policies and agency processes can be strengthened in support of Tribal sovereignty.

Mobility is acknowledged as a key practice through which pastoralists adapt to climatic and socio-economic stressors. Yet, ‘how’ it is enacted and experienced is less understood. By approaching mobility through the lens of pace, this article explores how the Rabari pastoralists of western India plan, organise and embody their movements at the intersection of weather and crop cycles, animal and human lifecycles, production objectives, social relations and affective experiences, embedded in their own history and politics. It unpacks dynamics at four integrated scales – the intra-day, intra-seasonal, inter-seasonal and long-term scale, which, while foregrounding the temporal, incorporates multiple spatial scales – from the field, to the village and the region – and social scales – from the individual flock to the migrating group and the community – to tease out key interlinkages for pastoral mobility. It shows how pastoralists seize unique opportunities through flexible and precise movements. It indicates the ways in which pastoral mobility produces and is produced by myriad human and more-than-human entanglements, while also intersecting with multiple mobilities including those of people, goods and capital, that all impinge on each other. Further, these movements are experienced affectively and differentially by each member of the household and community, across intersections of age, gender and wealth status. Finally, ‘pace’ disrupts the ‘sedentist bias’ often found in pastoral development that not only privileges spatial concerns but also a framework of fixity, regularity, and boundedness that counters the flexibility, ambiguity and multiplicity characteristic of pastoral mobility, adaptation and attunement to context. It reveals mobility as adaptive capacity and opens inquiry into new avenues of action to address growing challenges, and secure pastoralism's current and future contribution to food and livelihood security as well as benefits to climate mitigation and nature conservation.

To unravel the nuances of the concept and process of land and green grabbing and shed more light on Western European cases, this article focuses on the planning process for expanding the Antwerp port on the Left Bank of the river Scheldt and nature compensation in the adjacent agricultural area. The research mobilizes the strategic-relational institutionalist approach enhanced with the framework of ecological and economic crisis moments seeing planning instruments as politicized social processes embedded in social discourses and institutional changes. It draws on semi-structured interviews and document analysis to address the question: To what extent do actors and institutions involved in nature compensations in the Left Bank enable double land grabbing? In the planning process for the port's expansion, running from 1997 to 2022, the authors identify four dominant institutional fields, three significant crisis moments, and six relevant social groups and the mobilized discourses that played a role in either enabling or obstructing the grabbing process. This influenced the rise of crisis moments, marked by three major judicial cases involving the Council of State, which structured the shifts from one institutional field to the other. As four planning episodes on nature compensations unfolded, including several spatial plans, a complex process, and a negotiation phase, these institutional fields ultimately enabled a double land grab, combining land appropriation for both spatial development and environmental purposes, by giving primacy to pro-compensation discourses and allies. Overall, this study shows the importance of understanding ‘grabbing’ as a nuanced, transformative, and gradually institutionalizing social process.

Historically, many Indigenous communities across the world have practiced seasonal burning to manage their local ecosystems. This practice shaped forest terrains worldwide and established an intentional and active relationship between humans and fire. Yet, perceived as a threat to wildlife and biodiversity, colonial policies have banned the burning of forests, and customary fire management remains a point of disagreement between conventional forest managers and Indigenous Peoples. This is particularly evident among Adivasis (Indigenous Peoples of India), whose use and understanding of fire are often disregarded in forest management, and the prohibition on traditional burning practices continues in India. Through open-ended interviews and transect walks in the Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary in the South Indian state of Kerala, we discuss Adivasi engagements with cultural burning. In this study, Adivasi members characterized fire as: (1) a preserver and groomer of landscape identity; (2) a co-manager and actor within specific forest terrains; and (3) an enabler of socio-ecological function and relationships. Through this, we explain human–fire coexistence—what enables it and how it benefits human–forest systems and fire's multifaceted role in many ecosystems. Fire clears up forests and supports Adivasi mobility, access within and interactions with forest ecosystems, and coexistence with wild animals. It enables the growth of grass and native trees, leading to a productive, functional, and healthy “good forest.” We argue that alternative fire dialogs provide opportunities for land management policies that better reflect distinct fire ontologies and for the practices that might then follow. Additionally, as forest fires increase, revisiting Indigenous perspectives can offer lessons for coexistence with fire to minimize its consequences in future landscapes.

Mining frontiers are moving ever further beyond Earth's surface, as new subterranean realms, the seafloor, the atmosphere and outer space increasingly come into the purview of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we deploy an environmental governmentality analytic to examine mining as a site-specific, intervening activity that brings the relationship between these different material spaces into view. We recognise that as mining expands through technological advancement ever further beyond its previous terrestrial foundations, it builds on and deepens colonial environmental governance strategies. We argue that as it does so, efforts to govern mining are likely to be increasingly challenged by its ‘excess’, by which we mean the matter that surpasses surficial enclosures and goes on to produce unintended physical and social consequences for other spaces and places. We construct our argument by examining secondary data on mining at three resource frontiers at varying stages of exploitation and associated governance: (i) surface mining during European colonialisation of the Amazon Basin; (ii) ongoing preparations for deep-sea mining in the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone of the Pacific Ocean; and (iii) the prospect of asteroid mining in outer space. Overall, the paper draws attention to the overlapping nature of the planet's voluminous, material spaces and its ability to frustrate environmental governance efforts. It offers a voluminous analysis across material spaces to burgeoning debates within political ecology.

For the realization of a deep geological repository, geoscientists have investigated various geological formations and assessed their suitability as host rocks for the long-term disposal of high-level nuclear waste. A fundamental epistemological uncertainty has characterized this geoscientific exploration of the subterranean, evolving not only as a scientific-technical challenge in deep geological disposal projects but also as a sociopolitical one. This paper scrutinizes how the Swiss nuclear waste organization, during its recent drilling campaign, has publicly staged the Opalinus clay as a stable rock in order to make its disposal project feasible and sound. Based on ethnographic fieldwork as well as document and media analysis, it traces how science communication experts have created and arranged a series of maps, models, and materials to make the subterranean tangible to a surface audience over the course of the campaign. Strategically assembled at specific events, it shows that these political materials did not simply represent subterranean spaces but constituted a stratified subterranean geology on the surface. On this basis, this paper underlines the performative dimension of geology and the key importance of stabilizing geology in science-society encounters for deep geological disposal projects to advance. By illustrating how the subterranean has come to matter and became politically significant in Switzerland's contentious nuclear (waste) history, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the constitutive role of geology for imagining a postnuclear future.

We explore ambiguities and conflicts attached to climate change, taking a narrative approach to analyse varying representations within a media article on oil drilling in new and ecologically fragile areas on the seabeds outside Northern Norway. We explore how two narrators actively negotiate dominant Norwegian social imaginary significations of the welfare state, economic growth, and nature protection, creating narratives to negotiate changes to wider cultural, economic, and ecological agendas, to cope with the liminality of climate change. Where earlier narrative approaches to climate change have tended to focus on the whats (for example the contents, structures, or sequences of climate change narratives), our approach focuses on the hows of climate change narratives, investigating climate change as a liminal phase and tracing how social imaginaries are destabilized through narrative work.

In this paper, we critique a pervasive discourse about the environmental implications of artificial intelligence as witnessed in news media, public policy analysis and computer science literature. In this discourse, AI is seen through a paradoxical lens: as essential to reducing the damaging effects of the climate crisis and, at the same time, a looming threat to both the climate and broader ecological crises. This seemingly contradictory framing of AI as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’ resonates with the concept of pharmakon, a heuristic device used extensively in the philosophy of technology. In this paper we show how the policy discourses of leading actors such as the OECD, Green Software Foundation and Microsoft's data scientists resolve the pharmacological nature of AI's environmental impact by narrowing the scope of its toxic properties and hence the solutions required to enable the technology's continued use and expansion. We argue that these discourses are reducing and oversimplifying the problem at stake to a simple proposition: we need more AI for climate tech applications but less energy thirsty AI. We show how this framing of the problem arose from a particular recent political history of the ‘techlash’, which in turn prompted considerable efforts to quantify AI's carbon footprint. We suggest a different problematisation inspired by science and technology studies scholar Andrew Barry's methodological approach, one that can re-open the problem-space of AI's environmental impact. This approach is sketched through four methodological starting points: unpacking the material entanglements between AI and ecologies; being sensible to geohistory – the specific locally situated nature of data centres and energy grids sustaining AI training, tuning and deployment; envisioning the multiplicity of solutions to the climate crisis (beyond carbon accounting of the AI footprint); and finally, rereading AI (by acknowledging the heterogeneity of actors and interests along AI supply chains).

Geographical scholarship has paid increasing attention to the rise of so-called green industries. To evolutionary economic geographers, the development of such green industries represents a distinctive, ‘green’ form of path creation. Although green industries can significantly reconfigure socio-ecological relations, studies of green path creation tend to shy away from examining what green means and how green matters for green industries to take off. To address this research gap, this study examines the development of a battery recycling firm in Shenzhen by integrating perspectives from evolutionary economic geography and political-industrial ecology. We unpack the creation of a green development path in the battery recycling industry as a process of bargaining and interactions among actors who view used batteries differently. By doing so, this study enriches existing scholarship on geographies of waste, green path creation, and nature-society geography.

The wind has profound cultural and economic value and plays an increasingly important role in today's economic system. Despite this, wind remains under-conceptualised as a resource in accounts of energy transition. This paper traces the resourcification of wind in the context of energy transition in the Republic of Ireland, analysing how the material properties of wind resources interact with the social property relations governing their integration into the economy. It does so by tracing the economic practices which ascribe value to the wind and integrate it into the system of commodity production, namely assetization by landowners in the form of rent payments. This is a key, and often overlooked, first step which precedes the conversion of wind resources into an electricity commodity by project developers. This assetization is composed of two moments: Firstly, the wind is treated as de facto private property through ‘proxy wind rights’ for landowners. Secondly, struggles over surplus value appropriation and distribution occur between landowners, developers and local communities. The outcomes of these two moments of wind assetization are unpacked. The paper concludes by discussing the implications for the relationship between agency and forms of rent, as well as the ‘world-making’ potential of concepts like ‘wind rights’ for prefigurative politics in energy transitions.

Since Argentina became the world's largest consumer of glyphosate, Argentine producers’ lives, livelihoods, and landscapes have become intimately entwined with agrochemicals. This article follows a range of settler-farmers making “common sense” decisions about how to live and farm with agrochemicals in Argentina's genetically modified (GM) soy belt. In a process I call agrochemical worlding, settler-farmers perspectives about agrochemical safety are informed by long-standing arrangements about who determines how to use Argentine land, thereby shaping how settler-farmers move through a landscape saturated with agrochemicals. Using a progression of ethnographic encounters, I situate and then dislodge a sense of agrochemical safety by attending to enactments of different agrochemical ontologies. Attention to worlding practices at the intersection of settler common sense and toxicity both situates GM farming in Argentina as a form of settler agriculture, and agrochemical use as a contemporary technique of settler colonialism.

In this paper I conceptualise “biosecurity bordering” as the distribution of biosecurity practices throughout the spaces of everyday life. I explore biosecurity bordering through a case study of the National Animal Identification and Tracing (NAIT) scheme for tracing livestock movements in Aotearoa New Zealand. NAIT acts as a filtering technology, separating (un)healthy animal bodies and (non)compliant farmers. These practices of “firewall bordering” are spatially distributed across sites that extend inwards and outwards from the farm gate. Animal movements across these sites lead to the emergence of “grey zones”, spaces where livestock become disconnected from their digital records. Furthermore, animals become borders in the NAIT scheme: the connections between ears, tags, and data establish a biometric border that aims to secure livestock identities and control their mobilities. But this can lead to the misidentification of some animals as illegitimate border crossers, rendering them as “abject life” without value and therefore cullable. This paper contributes to an emerging area of literature that draws together critical studies of borders and biosecurity, and points to areas for further research into the intimate experiences, and visceral consequences, of biosecurity bordering.