Property as Socio-Technical Infrastructure

• In Event: Turning (More) Things into Assets: Techno-economic TRANSformations

Abstract

The recent spate of hurricanes has devastated coastal regions around the world, and is forcing people to re-orient their everyday social lives to reckon with shifting oceanic environments. Scholars have noted that there are similarities between the varied hurricane-hit regions from Houston, Puerto Rico to other flood-prone regions like Bangladesh or Mumbai (Ghosh 2017; Sobel 2014). Across these contexts, regional environmental activists, national governmental bodies and transnational actors (TERI 2014; World Bank 2011) have argued that in order to fix the problems of climate change and rising sea levels governments must fix the legal meanings of property. In India, technocratic fixes of property use have emerged as the dominant discursive focus of environmentalists. In this paper I draw on STS approaches to the study of law and infrastructure (Riles 2011;Star 1996) and concepts of socio-technical imaginary (Jasanoff and Kim 2015) and preliminary fieldwork in South India. Here I understand property as technical infrastructure that forms relationships between humans and environment. This paper argues that technical fixes do not merely solve an existing problem, but first constitute them discursively and materially (Fortun 2001). The coast of Chennai is a pluridiverse space where people hold multiple social relationships with the environment. Oceanic and beach commons are classic examples of resources which are not legally defined as taxable “property”. In this context, fixing property use through law involves the reworking of existing relationships into technical, and legalistic terms. This paper argues that technical fixes involving property also rework social relations and are politically fraught. This paper points to how technological fixes to climate change materialize in culturally specific ways.

Author

• Oviya Govindan