Environmental Computability

The Politics of Knowing and Governing Climate Change

Abstract

Digitalization increasingly shapes how environments are known and governed amid climate change. This editorial develops the notion of environmental computability to describe the socio-material conditions through which environments become measurable, comparable, and actionable through computational systems, asking what knowledge, infrastructures, and relations of authority make this possible. Rather than simply introducing the contributions to this special issue, it reads them alongside existing scholarship on digitalization and environmental governance, offering a synthesis of current insights into how computable environments become entangled with questions of expertise and extraction, maintenance and care, and inequality—sand with longer histories carried into contemporary climate futures. Drawing on feminist STS, I propose diffraction and refraction as complementary analytical perspectives: diffraction attends to how computational environments emerge through relations, while refraction traces how existing relations of power and inequality are redirected through digital infrastructures. Together, they make visible the politics of environmental computability and the dys/continuities through which digitalization and climate governance become entangled.