UC San Diego

This dissertation analyzes using regulatory technologies within participatory processes of environmental governance that aim for just outcomes. Since the rise of informational responses to environmental management in the 1980s, the dominant regulatory regime has employed tools and technologies such as monitoring, mapping, and computer modeling for governance. Moreover, the regulatory regime presents these tools as the means for collective civic participation within governance mechanisms, influencing the potential for solidarities within and across social movements. To tease out these potentials, I focus on two related cases under the aegis of high-stakes, state legislation claiming to be community-driven. The first is implementing a state-mandated, community-driven air pollution mitigation program in the Portside Environmental Justice Neighborhoods of San Diego. Pollution from military-industrial and vehicular sources has long disproportionately burdened this community. From here, the project travels up the coast in the second case to analyze the participation of various environmental justice activists across California to develop a state-wide plan for carbon neutrality using computer models. Through these cases, I problematize dominant forms of environmental governance as they call on civic participation. Over two-and-a-half years, I conducted extensive fieldwork in San Diego and Sacramento at sites of mediative practices between the state, market, and civil society. I examined various stages of development, maintenance, use, and contestation of these collective regulatory technologies in practice. In addition to participant observation and observant participation, I conducted over 125 semi-structured interviews, analyzed historical documents, and developed designed interventions.

I advance a concept of 'social infrastructure of governance' (social infrastructure) to identify, describe, and analyze the labor and social practices that foster and maintain solidarities for participatory governance. I argue that far from being subordinate to technocratic tools, this social infrastructure's work makes governing with scientific and technical instruments both possible and contestable. Further, environmental justice's participation in environmental governance is not predestined to be subsumed by the dominant regulatory regime. Instead, social movement actors routinely develop counter-practices resulting from reproductive work of social infrastructures. Through these counter-practices, social movement actors tactically use environmental governance spaces to develop and maintain other forms of knowledge and solidarities and reimagine governance structures. This work indicates that amidst calls for data-driven environmental justice and a desire for a just transition, social movement, state, and market actors must recognize the labors and practices of social infrastructure as both vital to the legitimacy of and resistance to prevailing regulatory technologies. Social infrastructure holds the possibility for both reformative and transformative solidarities. Results from this study will enhance theories of civic participation in technoscientific forms of environmental justice and governance, with implications for policymakers, environmental justice activists, designers, civic groups, scientists, and state agencies. Although this dissertation focuses on environmental governance, it can spur discussions in various other domains of governance that call for increased participation and oversight from civic actors for just outcomes.