The project «The digital turn in environmental governance: Insights from the energy and agri-food systems» (DEMO) with contract number TED2021-132205A-I00, received funding from MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and from the European Union “NextGenerationEU”/PRTR.

The EU is betting its future on the twin digital and green transition. The European Green Deal refers to the green and digital “twin transition” and defines digital technologies as “a critical enabler for attaining the sustainability goals of the Green Deal”. Overlapping with the implementation of the European Green Deal, the digitalisation of life has been accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic and by funding of digital initiatives through the Recovery and Resilience Funds that the EU assigned to Member States following the pandemic.

Yet, how those two spheres (i.e. the digital and the ecological) are or ought to be connected has not been spelled out. In this accelerating turn towards the digital society and economy, it is important to understand how the ‘twinning’ of the digital and the ecological transitions takes place, redefining environmental governance. Consequently, the DEMO project will examine the redefinition of environmental governance within digital energy systems and digital agri-food systems in Spain. These two sectors were selected because of their rapid digitalisation. The project will look at digital practices and imaginaries around environmental policies from the lenses of Science and Technology Studies and political ecology.

DEMO aims to contribute to the following research gaps:

1. Theorising ‘what’ and ‘where’ the digital is with a specific focus on the energy and agri-food sectors. The promotion of the digital transition has focused primarily on the development of technologies, business models and modelling tools that can support digital policy-making. Using the lens of STS, we will contribute to a conceptualisation of “the digital” beyond technological and material artefacts and study how digital technologies shape, and are shaped by, the social, political, economic and institutional orders they co-produce.
2. Untangling the relationship of digitalisation with sustainability in the fields of energy and agri-food. There is an emerging literature on the “twin transition” that indicates both the opportunities and limits of coupling sustainability with digitalisation. Through four in-depth case studies on energy and agriculture from Spain, we will contribute to this emerging field by: (i) providing empirical examples of how digitalisation frames sustainability in the energy and agri-food systems and (ii) identifying which options, tools and processes digitalisation creates for governance.
3. Critically revisiting the expected environmental benefits of digitalisation in order to contribute to more sustainable policy-making. We will analyse the sustainability of the digital transition itself, both from an environmental and social point of view, (i) mobilising alternative framings about environmental sustainability from political ecology and geography, and (ii) about social sustainability including issues of power, justice and equity that may emerge with the digitalisation.
4. Understanding the role of COVID19 in accelerating the turn to digitalisation in energy and agri-food. We will investigate how and why COVID19 has exacerbated the turn to digitalisation and which types of digitalisation are being promoted.

The DEMO project started in December 2022 and will run until December 2024.