Assembling authority to govern for nature: Nature tech coming to save nature-based solutions?

As governments, businesses, investors and civil society increasingly turn to ‘Nature-Based Solutions’ (NBS) as central means to govern the intertwined crises of biodiversity loss and climate change, a particular form of expertise is jostling for attention in this crowded policy arena – Nature Tech. Nature Tech is a broad term used to encompass ‘smart tech’ trained on nature, involving tools such as eDNA, machine learning algorithms, and other forms of tech-enabled measurement, observation and prediction. While Nature Tech is not mandated by a central governing authority to steer these NBS agendas, there is an emerging consensus that such tools are needed to steer the governing of NBS. Understanding how such an emerging consensus is generated and sustained raises questions where authority to accomplish tech-enabled governance is attained. Centring these questions leads us to the ongoing work by the Nature Tech community, and more specifically to Nature4Climate, a focal actor through which we enter the community. While the Nature Tech community are making claims to save NBS from the inevitable barriers evaluating their multiple impacts in highly varied conditions, these claims and their politics are rarely subject to interrogation. To go deeper into understanding how Nature Tech becomes a form of politics that is both pervasive and authoritative, this paper attends to four dynamics of problematization which are essential to assemble the authority to govern for nature: (re)assembling, forging alignments, rendering technical and authorising knowledge while managing contestations. Based on a “mobile” ethnography, this paper reveals how a growing number of actors enrolled in the Nature Tech community are authorising Nature Tech as an obligatory passageway shaping the possibilities for action. This has undetermined and potentially radical implications for how governance along shifting and unfolding climate-biodiversity frontiers is accomplished.