- Title
- Salmon, sensors, and translation : the agency of Big Data in environmental governance
- Creator
- Ascui, Francisco; Haward, Marcus; Lovell, Heather
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Text; Journal article; Article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/188116
- Identifier
- vital:17195
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818766892
- Identifier
- ISSN:0263-7758 (ISSN)
- Abstract
- This paper explores the emerging role of Big Data in environmental governance. We focus on the case of salmon aquaculture management from 2011 to 2017 in Macquarie Harbour, Australia, and compare this with the foundational case that inspired the development of the concept of ‘translation’ in actor-network theory, that of scallop domestication in St Brieuc Bay, France, in the 1970s. A key difference is the salience of environmental data in the contemporary case. Recent dramatic events in the environmental governance of Macquarie Harbour have been driven by increasing spatial and temporal resolution of environmental monitoring, including real-time data collection from sensors mounted on the fish themselves. The resulting environmental data now takes centre stage in increasingly heated debates over how the harbour should be managed: overturning long-held assumptions about environmental interactions, inducing changes in regulatory practices and institutions, fracturing historical alliances and shaping the on-going legitimacy of the industry. Environmental Big Data is now a key actor within the networks that constitute and enact environmental governance. Given its new and unpredictable agency, control over access to data is likely to become critical in future power struggles over environmental resources and their governance. © The Author(s) 2018.
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications Ltd
- Relation
- Environment and Planning D: Society and Space Vol. 36, no. 5 (2018), p. 905-925
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
- Rights
- Copyright © The Author(s) 2018
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- 3304 Urban and regional planning; 4406 Human geography; 4408 Political science; Actor-network theory; Aquaculture; Big Data; Environmental governance; Salmon; Translation
- Full Text
- Reviewed
- Funder
- The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the Australian Commonwealth Department of Infrastructure and Rural Development under the Sense-T ‘Sensing Natural Capital’ project.
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