MISSING WOOD FOR THE TREES: THE SOCIAL LIFE OF CONSERVATION IN THE DIGITAL ERA

In recent times, in an increasingly climate uncertain world, the processes of conservation and restoration have witnessed a digital turn. Governance mechanisms from mapping commons, to accessing subsidies, to participating in joint forest management portal, all are migrating to digital platforms. In agriculture as well there has been a mushrooming of agro–tech firms such as Agrico aiming to establish itself as a digital platform that would license and use existing agricultural research to scale its resulting solutions rapidly across farmers in different geographies. Needless to say that the overarching rationale behind this increasing digitisation has been to achieve and sustain ecological and social sustainability. However, inherent in these conservation–restoration projects prioritising hi–tech managerial solutions is the assumption that technological interventions are essentially efficient, mitigational, and therefore, apolitical. The new digitised governance encouraging mobile app based conservation portals, satellite survey, electronic land recording tends to obscure stakeholders’ agency, grassroots knowledge and dialogue, dialogue that has once been the hallmark of the Joint Forest Management (JFM) that the government instituted in India in the decades 80s and 90s in an attempt to render conservation people centric and participation based programme. In the light of the above the paper looks into the social career of conservation in the digital era; the question that arises is, how do we conceptualise local or grassroots’ knowledge especially in the light of its increasing encounter with app–based technologies, algorithmic management and the specialist techies as the new developers? And secondly, can the increasing digitisation of the sustainability initiatives meant to achieve environmental/climate justice necessarily address the contentious issues surrounding social justice?