{"title":"Measuring soil, making territory: Developing eDNA and other soil biodiversity indicators in Finland as a struggle over scales of governance","authors":"Jelena Salmi , Anna Krzywoszynska","doi":"10.1016/j.envsci.2025.104173","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>As a key instrument of governance, indicators are world-making; and yet, the processes by which indicators are made are rarely critically examined or opened to public scrutiny. Monitoring a soil biodiversity, as part of monitoring soil health, is increasingly relevant to policy. Healthy soils are cast as a ‘nature-based solution’ to socio-ecological challenges such as sustainable food production, land degradation, human health, and climate change. In this paper, we shed light on the unexamined politics of soil biodiversity indicators, with Finland as a case study. Our discourse analysis of 103 governance and grey literature documents finds that tensions around indicators can clearly be seen as struggles over the scale of governance. Soil biodiversity indicators are part of the EU’s project of territorialization: an attempt to create governable territories for EU-scale ecosystem services optimization. We find that in Finland eDNA emerges as the preferred scientific basis for soil biodiversity governance due to an alignment of interests between scientific and policy groups concerned with cost efficiency and competitive prestige. However, critical voices, especially from within land workers’ organisations, argue that basing soil policies on eDNA methods risks obscuring local specificity, and creating environmental and social injustice. Instead, alternative indicators are called for and proposed, which are more relevant at local scales of action: accessible, and epistemically just. Without heeding these critical voices, we argue, soil biodiversity science and governance risks further alienating land management groups - who are indispentible in achieving soil health. We call, therefore, for soil biodiversity indicators and knowledge infrastructures centered on strengthening the capacities of the very people tasked with delivering soil biodiversity improvements: land workers.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":313,"journal":{"name":"Environmental Science & Policy","volume":"171 ","pages":"Article 104173"},"PeriodicalIF":5.2000,"publicationDate":"2025-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Environmental Science & Policy","FirstCategoryId":"93","ListUrlMain":"https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901125001893","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"环境科学与生态学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
As a key instrument of governance, indicators are world-making; and yet, the processes by which indicators are made are rarely critically examined or opened to public scrutiny. Monitoring a soil biodiversity, as part of monitoring soil health, is increasingly relevant to policy. Healthy soils are cast as a ‘nature-based solution’ to socio-ecological challenges such as sustainable food production, land degradation, human health, and climate change. In this paper, we shed light on the unexamined politics of soil biodiversity indicators, with Finland as a case study. Our discourse analysis of 103 governance and grey literature documents finds that tensions around indicators can clearly be seen as struggles over the scale of governance. Soil biodiversity indicators are part of the EU’s project of territorialization: an attempt to create governable territories for EU-scale ecosystem services optimization. We find that in Finland eDNA emerges as the preferred scientific basis for soil biodiversity governance due to an alignment of interests between scientific and policy groups concerned with cost efficiency and competitive prestige. However, critical voices, especially from within land workers’ organisations, argue that basing soil policies on eDNA methods risks obscuring local specificity, and creating environmental and social injustice. Instead, alternative indicators are called for and proposed, which are more relevant at local scales of action: accessible, and epistemically just. Without heeding these critical voices, we argue, soil biodiversity science and governance risks further alienating land management groups - who are indispentible in achieving soil health. We call, therefore, for soil biodiversity indicators and knowledge infrastructures centered on strengthening the capacities of the very people tasked with delivering soil biodiversity improvements: land workers.
期刊介绍:
Environmental Science & Policy promotes communication among government, business and industry, academia, and non-governmental organisations who are instrumental in the solution of environmental problems. It also seeks to advance interdisciplinary research of policy relevance on environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity, environmental pollution and wastes, renewable and non-renewable natural resources, sustainability, and the interactions among these issues. The journal emphasises the linkages between these environmental issues and social and economic issues such as production, transport, consumption, growth, demographic changes, well-being, and health. However, the subject coverage will not be restricted to these issues and the introduction of new dimensions will be encouraged.