How does data "fix futures" in your project?
Fixing as repair: Data is mobilized as the evidence base for policy-making for reaching interntional biodiversity targets
Fixing as stabilizing: Data stabilizes certain ideas about what nature is and about what futures are possible
How is data legitimized?
Ideas about what constitutes expertise, science and knowledge make certain knowledge practices authoritative for creating and mobilizing specific kinds of data for IPBES assessments, rendering them 'policy-relevant'.
How is data contested?
From what I have observed so far no single idea about legitimate data exists in my field (or any field?). Because IPBES is trying to be open to different disciplines, knowledge systems and stakeholders, it creates a network of a diversity of data ideologies as well. So, contestation of data is inherent to practices in IPBES, but the goal is always to dissolve these contestations, because IPBES products are consensus-based. It is therefore important to scutinize how contestations are handled, and how consensus is built and what is "fixed" through this process.
Data - Macro
IPBES wants to produce 'policy-relevant' knowledge on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Data in this regard is mobilized as a crucial resource for making policies and framing these as evidence-based.
Data - Eco
IPBES assessments are organized around data on nature, biodiversity and ecosystems. It becomes interesting how nature or biodiversity as a concept emerges through this data, and how it might get reconfigured through the practices that emerge out of the policies constituted around this data. It is also interesting to look at the geographies of ignorance this data produces and how certain entities cannot be captured by existing data practices.
Data - Expertise
The definitions of what expertise is in a particular field influences what data becomes relevant in it and who interprets it. On the other hand, data might also influence how understandings of what expertise is change over time.
Definitions:
What resource?
Ecosystem Services / Nature's Contributions to people
Who mobilizes this resource?
The terms are central in IPBES's conceptual framework, that structures all of its work. In this way they are mobilized across the whole organization of IPBES and all working stages: including by natural scientists, social scientists, policy makers, political bureacrats. Open question: Do indigenous people and knowledge holders also mobilize this term?
Towards what ends is this resource mobilized?
The terms are mobilized to emphasize how reliant on nature humans are. It is mobilized to show that societies are destroying their base of life, if they destroy nature. However, the ecosystem services term also has a more economic connotation, by being used to (monetarily) quantify how much ecosystem services contribute to e.g. food production.
Data models:
What resource?
Different kinds of models are mobilized in IPBES assessments: e.g. ecosystem models, socio-economic models, social-ecological systems models
Who mobilizes this resource?
Directly: modellers; indirectly: other scientists, policy-makers, etc.
Towards what ends is this resource mobilized?
Qualitatively or quantitatively desribing key components of a system and relationships between those components.
Predict impacts of indirect and direct drivers on biodiversity and ecosystems
Measurement standards:
What resource?
Indicators of change in biodiversity and ecosystem services
Who mobilizes this resource?
assessment experts/authors
Towards what ends is this resource mobilized?
Description from IPBES website: "standardized indicators have the potential to provide a common thread and quantitative point of comparison among assessments" (https://www.ipbes.net/indicators)