Vol. 88 (2026): Making Environments Computable: Digitalization, Climate Change and Environmental Governance

From species observations and plant sensors to data centers and urban sustainability initiatives, environmental governance increasingly unfolds through digital infrastructures. This Special Issue examines these transformations ethnographically across Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, and Bangladesh. The editorial develops environmental computability as a way of bringing these transformations into analytical relation, asking how classifications, infrastructures, and epistemic commitments make environments computationally legible. The contributions trace these socio-material relations across sites: Artportalen reveals tensions between representational data and relational more-than-human encounters; Swiss smart farming shows how granularity is produced through collaboration and infrastructures; research in Dhaka exposes how technological solutionism is complicated by capitalist dynamics and inequality; and cloud infrastructures in Germany and Switzerland challenge narratives of digital dematerialization through hydrating, humming, and shuttling. Together, the contributions foreground the political and material conditions through which digitalization and climate change become increasingly entangled in environmental governance across sites and scales, while redistributing authority, resources, expertise, and possibilities for intervention in uneven ways worldwide.

Keywords: Digitalization; Climate change; Environmental governance; Environmental computability; Technological solutionism

Eitel, Kathrin und Dennis Eckhardt (Hgs.) (2026): Making Environments Computable. Digitalization, Climate Change and Environmental Governance. Kulturanthropologie Notizen 88.