Automating violence? The anti-politics of ‘smart technology’ in biodiversity conservation

Background

Biodiversity conservation initiatives, such as the UN's post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (30x30), increasingly use smart technologies. Despite recognizing Indigenous and local rights for successful conservation, these initiatives often neglect customary rights and uses. Smart technologies, like AI, camera traps, and drones, enable new surveillance methods. State, private, and corporate actors, including big tech and BINGOs, actively adopt these tools to enhance data access and form smart governance networks.

Goals and Methods

This article analyzes the politics driving the promotion of “smart technologies” in biodiversity conservation, focusing on partnerships between big-tech corporations, BINGOs, and bilateral organizations. Parris-Piper et al. aim to reveal how framing this technology as solely successful overlooks its potential harm to local and Indigenous peoples and ignores the main economic drivers of biodiversity loss. Examining global-local partnerships in technology design and adoption, the study uses Palawan Island, Philippines, to show how decentralized technologies can rapidly monitor, restrict, and criminalize Indigenous resource access by those in control. The analysis, based on policy review and fieldwork, illuminates how market-driven valorization of smart technology intensifies surveillance while neglecting extractive industries' political economy.

Conclusions and Takeaways

The study reveals that the valorization of smart technologies in conservation can obscure their complexities and potentially automate violence against Indigenous and local peoples by restricting their rights to livelihoods, lands, and waters. This “anti-politics” deflects attention from challenging extractive industries, major drivers of biodiversity loss, and instead favors expanding industrial extractive development. Government officials promote technological solutions, avoiding contentious extractive development and creating profit opportunities for political elites. These same state actors endorse smart technology conservation while approving overlapping mining and plantations on ancestral lands. This pervasive anti-politics automates control and violence over Indigenous territories and resources. Critical analysis of data extraction, ownership, and use is crucial to prevent infringement upon Indigenous rights and to confront associated resource extractions.