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Emerging technologies are increasingly being sought as interventions to intractable environmental and public health issues that promise to intensify on our warming planet. Genetically engineered mosquitoes could curb the impacts of mosquito-borne diseases like malaria and dengue. Solar geoengineering could use cloud thinning or aerosol scattering to reflect sunlight back into space and cool the planet. Adequate regulatory and governance mechanisms do not yet exist for these technologies, the impacts of which span international boundaries, and have the power to irreversibly alter environments. There is wide recognition from national and international bodies that decision-making processes surrounding these technologies must engage local and Indigenous communities whose lands and resources would be impacted by their trial and deployment. In response, public, community, and stakeholder “engagement” has taken center stage in the discourse on emerging environmental technology governance. Scientists and technologists are now compelled to engage publics and communities, as they recognize that some form of engagement or authorization will be requisite to the application of their technologies outside the laboratory. The language of participatory engagement abounds in scientific and governance literature on environmental technologies. These texts espouse the importance of co-design, relationship-building, shared decision-making, and mutual learning, and recognize the uneven power relations in which environmental decisions have historically been made. Yet, emergent practices of engagement leave much to be desired in terms of realizing their stated aspirations. Deficit model approaches frame publics and communities primarily as “lay people” needing to be educated before weighing in on decisions. In my fieldwork on one Pacific island where genetically modified mosquitoes are being considered for endangered bird conservation, I observed a focus group in a market research firm in which local and Indigenous residents were tested on their knowledge of invasive species biology and asked to rank radio advertisements and slogans about the modified mosquitoes. The conflation of engagement with marketing strategies and public relations campaigns prioritize the management of public perception over genuine dialogue or mutual learning. In theory, all the interest in engagement promises to open up meaningful possibilities for local and Indigenous communities to realize their rights to self-determination. In practice, strategic and instrumental approaches instead subdue opposition and manufacture consent. Legal mechanisms are needed to codify Indigenous rights in decision-making processes. Alternative approaches are needed that widen the focus beyond a single technofix to let communities define environmental challenges and collectively imagine solutions. Opposition should be read not as a barrier but as a generative site for inquiry, as often it is not the technology itself being refused but the exclusionary processes that surround its use. The most just solutions are likely to emerge from those very refusals. 

Taitingfong, Riley. 2023. "It’s all talk: how community engagement is failing in environmental technology governance." In 4S Paraconference X EiJ: Building a Global Record, curated by Misria Shaik Ali, Kim Fortun, Phillip Baum and Prerna Srigyan. Annual Meeting of the Society of Social Studies of Science. Honolulu, Hawai'i, Nov 8-11.

The previous annotation opened with Navajo Nation President Jonathan Nez’s remarks about being forgotten by the U.S. federal government, and the failure of federal actors to recognize their responsibility and respond to the needs of Indigenous nations of the United States. What President Nez said authorizes a common discourse circulating among Indigenous nations around the world about “being forgotten,” and the general ignorance of the nations within which sovereign nations are nested (see IITC Webinar Series). The Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has made the experience of being forgotten painfully apparent. In the previous annotation, I described how recent reportage has displaced this noticeable discursive gap in the absence of the federal government. This annotation amplifies the irony that such structures and processes of forgetting are becoming increasingly visible.

In what follows, I will examine how ignorance and forgetting were enacted by the federal government through a new strategy of the politics of time, as witnessed in the untimely response to the crisis that is rapidly unfolding in the Navajo Nation (Dinétah). To be sure, the delay in federal emergency relief funds incapacitated public health responses across all levels of government—“tribal” and “non-tribal”—but in varying degrees; the impact was acute among tribal government. At a broad scale, what we have witnessed is an inversion of the “capacity building” that was once in vogue in international development discourse in the domains of government and business, and the effective reduction in the U.S. government’s capacity to respond to natural and anthropogenic disasters. I will not speculate on how such extensive incapacitation of government produced a neoliberal lapse that opened up a new space for privatizing ‘essential’ public health services and technologies. Instead I will focus on perceptions of “the lapse” itself, which marks a double meaning as both the passage of time and cognitive failure in memory.

President Nez underscored the urgency of the matter: “Navajo residents are panicking as these numbers rise... We need a lot of help fast from the federal government.” Nez continued by describing the partial access to limited emergency relief funds: “We’re barely getting bits and pieces. You have counties, municipalities, already taking advantage of these funds, and tribes are over here writing our applications and turning it in and waiting weeks to get what we need.” A New York Times report identifies the “delays in receiving federal emergency funds” and the compounding effect of “the requirement that tribal nations, unlike cities and counties, must apply for grants to receive money from federal stimulus legislation.” The report concludes, “the Navajo Nation—among other tribal nations — has faced crippling delays in receiving emergency funding” (NYT). An Arizona Congressman, Greg Stanton, echoed Nez’s concern using a similar vocabulary of timing: “Well, I’m very frustrated. I’m angry we’re waiting. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. The tragedy on the Navajo Nation is happening right now, in real-time. This is not the time for delay.”

This is not the time for delay. It bears repeating. The prevailing discourse of urgency and delay calls out the federal government’s strategic negotiation of the politics of time. The anthropologist Stuart Kirsch introduces the concept of the “politics of time” to understand how corporations strategically delay recognition of the environmental impacts of industry (2014:145-148, 155). I am advancing the concept here to account for how the Trump administration has scaled up the widespread corporate strategy of delaying recognition and deferring critique through a new form of government incapacity building—literally and actually building incapacity into every level of government. The lapse in the federal response is a new strategy of the politics of time that forces us to think critically about novel responses to incapacitating delays during the pandemic. Kirsch also accounts for the new politics of time leveraged by the critics of corporations: the novel strategy of critical intervention early in the production cycle made possible by accelerating the local learning curve and sharing information. In the new (covid) politics of time, both early intervention and information sharing were stifled by the once most trusted authority of information, the Executive Office of the President.

The incapacitating effects of the new politics of time are exacerbated by attempts to control information and, in this case, produce a dazzling array of misinformation at the discursive level of national public health. During an interview on Democracy Now!, Dean Seneca, former senior health scientist in the Partnership Support Unit of the Office for State, Tribal, Local and Territorial Support at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, offers a diagnosis for why the Indigenous impact of COVID-19 has been so severe: “Well, as you can tell, you know, right from the very beginning, I mean, [Trump] didn’t make this pandemic a priority. He did a lot of mixed messaging in the very, very beginning when he started to talk about this. And you see that he’s trying to now — in his recent reports, trying to justify that, ‘No, we were on top of this right from the beginning.’ And that’s far from the case. You know, his mixed messaging is what was really critical. At times, he would say, ‘Well, hey, this virus is just going to go away. And we’ll wake up one day, and it won’t be here.’ You know, people listen to this information, and that is the wrong thing to send. He made a major mistake in eliminating his council on international health and global pandemics. That was huge right from the beginning. He should never have done that.” These early interventions of the current administration had broad incapacitating impacts.