Abstract
International and transnational cooperation is needed to strengthen environmental governance initiatives with advanced technologies. In January 2023, Ontario Tech University hosted a symposium entitled Tech With a Green Governance Conscience: Exploring the Technology–Environmental Policy Nexus. Attendees spanned diverse disciplines, sectors, and countries, bringing unique and diverse perspectives to the technology–environmental policy nexus. Emergent themes arising from the symposium include the role of artificial intelligence in environmental governance, while eliminating the detrimental social impacts associated with these advanced technologies via algorithmic bias, misunderstanding, and unaccountability. The symposium explored the tech–society–ecology interface, such as the authoritarian intensification of digitalized environmental governance, “technocracy”, and the ethical implications of sacrificing democratic legitimacy in the face of imminent environmental destruction. Select participants (i.e., co-authors) at the symposium provided input on a preliminary framework, which led to this perspective article focused on the politics surrounding green governance in the 21st century. We conclude that while emerging technologies are being deployed to address grand environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion, the use of these various technologies for progressive environmental policy development and enforcement requires co-productivist approaches to constructive technology assessments and embracing the concept of technologies of humility. This necessitates a space for dialogue, reflection, and deliberation on leading adaptive environmental governance in the face of power and politics, as we interrogate the putative neutrality of advanced technology and techno-solutionism.
Introduction
Science and technology studies (STSs) remind us that technology is not deterministic, and that there is still agency and contingency as we embark on new and unprecedented technological possibilities. The STS scholarship also acknowledges that emerging technology does not unidirectionally shape our values and norms; rather, our understanding of governance and social organization informs the co-production of technology and what we make of nature, society, and the “real world” (Jasanoff 2012). The increasing use of digital information and communication technologies (ICTs) and artificial intelligence (AI) in environmental monitoring, regulation, and governance must be carefully considered as we try to tackle climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, pollution, and waste. This is because such technological measures may paradoxically result in increased damage through rebound effects. Adopting a co-productivist and constructive technology assessment (CTA) approach (Rip et al. 1995) to environmental governance, this paper argues that the social problems surrounding the use of these new technologies—for example, the global expansion of AI surveillance, the infringement of civil liberties, extractivism, and the commodification of nature via digitalization—must be addressed with humility and the inclusion of a large diversity of stakeholders in technological design and implementation processes (Kemp et al. 2001).
While knowledge of the intersection between advanced technology and the drivers (and impacts) of planetary threats holds tremendous promise in helping policymakers anticipate future risks to develop scenarios to test the possible effects of different policies and decisions (Foray and Grübler 1996; Jaffe et al. 2002), CTA must include sociotechnical critique in the design, development, and implementation phase so that policy informs the dynamics between emerging and advanced technologies and governance structures (Jaffe et al. 2003). Relying on Canadian examples of green governance, we examine the social and political shaping of a range of technologies and take into account the coproduction of these technologies and its effects on society.
