New Data Technologies and the Politics of Scale in Environmental Management: Tracking Atlantic Bluefin Tuna

Knowledge and scientific practice have largely been backdrops to examinations of scale and rescaling processes, including studies of rescaling environmental management. The growing use of new data technologies in environmental management highlights the need to situate knowledge and scientific practice into the politics and production of scale. Reviewing sixty years of debate over spatial management of the highly migratory and Atlantic bluefin tuna, this piece illustrates the central, dynamic roles of knowledge and scientific practice in scalar transboundary management. Findings corroborate prior studies demonstrating that stakeholders mobilize knowledge (and uncertainty) to influence spatialized management. We examine whether such practices are transformed by new data technologies, a nomenclature we adopt as “more” than big data to encapsulate and parse methods of data collection or generation, the data themselves, and the analytical techniques and infrastructures developed to make sense of data for management purposes. We find that as new data technologies reveal objects in space and time, they reformulate and multiply—rather than resolve and circumscribe—scalar management possibilities. They mix with historic scientific and political practices and are never “complete.” Beyond the bluefin case, findings point to the complications of turning to new data technologies—often uncritically celebrated for their potential to give clear, actionable data—to “solve” scalar dilemmas. Instead, they are positioned to become a new way of knowing the world: a new geo-epistemology that shapes experimentation and debate around the spatialized power relations determining control over contested spaces and the valuable resources within and moving through them.