‘Tidy data for clean pastures’: bureaucratic control of shrub encroachment and farmers’ environmental subjectivities
Résumé
In recent decades, environmental and agricultural administrations have increasingly relied on geospatial tools, such as GIS and satellite imagery. Within European agricultural policy, this digitalisation of nature serves both environmental conservation and budgetary discipline agendas. This article links the critical analysis of GIS instruments to the study of environmental subjectivities. Drawing on interviews with advisers, inspectors and farmers in southwestern France, I show how new forms of quantifying abandoned and grazed marginal lands shape farmers' environmental subjectivities related to shrub encroachment. Intended to integrate non-herbaceous resources into area-based subsidies, the procedure studied perpetuates the local distaste and the systematic mechanised removal of this type of vegetation. Therefore, it reinforces land control by increasingly capitalised farms instead of the emerging small-scale pastoral systems. These results contribute to the study of government spatial technologies and how they become entangled with local environmental subjectivities and related power dynamics.
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