Starting in January 2027, Dr Laura Bullón-Cassis will lead a four-year research project at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy and the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the Geneva Graduate Institute, funded by an SNSF Ambizione grant. The New Stewards: Earth Observation and the Public-Private Reordering of Climate Governance examines the partnerships forming between technology companies, space agencies and UN institutions around Earth observation, and the new configurations of expertise, capital and political authority they produce
About the project
Satellites have become central to how climate change is seen and understood. They monitor forests and oceans, detect methane emissions and track extreme weather, producing images, maps and datasets that circulate among scientists, governments, international organisations, journalists and the wider public. In doing so, they shape which environmental processes become visible, how they are represented, and which problems command political attention and action.
Historically, Earth observation has been shaped largely by states, national space agencies and publicly funded science, although commercial actors have long played a role. Over the past two decades, private companies have become increasingly influential, not only through the operation of satellite constellations and the production of environmental datasets, but also through control over the cloud platforms and AI systems used to process and interpret satellite data. A relatively small number of firms now command significant technological capacities on which public institutions increasingly depend, raising questions about the distribution of expertise, resources and authority in environmental governance.
Agreements such as those between Google and the World Meteorological Organization on early warning systems, or between the European Space Agency and IBM on AI models of the Earth, illustrate how corporate platforms and expertise are becoming increasingly important to public environmental institutions. They also raise questions about how these partnerships are governed, whose priorities they serve and how their terms are made publicly accountable.
The New Stewards examines how control over the infrastructures of environmental knowledge becomes a source of political authority, and how that authority is negotiated between public institutions and private technology companies. Decisions about what to observe, how frequently, how data are classified and who can access them help determine which environmental problems become visible and actionable. The project studies these partnerships as sites where technology executives, engineers, space agency officials and UN staff negotiate the distribution of expertise, resources and authority.
Through multi-sited ethnography, the project examines the institutions and partnerships through which satellite data are produced, interpreted and mobilised in environmental governance, as well as the public representations through which these arrangements acquire legitimacy. Bringing the sociology of elites and political economy into conversation with media and infrastructure studies, it traces how the capacity to see, know and govern environmental change is being redistributed in an era of platform capitalism. With Geneva serving as a major centre of international environmental governance, the project also speaks directly to debates about the changing relationship between public authority, private expertise and multilateral cooperation.
About Laura Bullon-Cassis
Laura Bullón-Cassis is a Research Fellow at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy (Geneva Graduate Institute). She holds a PhD with Distinction in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, as well as an MSc in Global Politics and a BSc in Sociology from the LSE. Working at the intersection of political sociology and media studies, her research examines the politics of knowledge, visibility and authority in global environmental governance, with particular attention to the actors, institutions and infrastructures that shape how political problems are understood and represented.
Her first monograph, The Time for Talk Is Over: Youth, Climate, and the Attention Economy of Global Politics (in preparation), examines the rise of youth as a political category in UN climate diplomacy, exploring how generational narratives and the politics of attention shape political legitimacy, visibility and the possibilities for political influence. Her more recent research extends these questions to the growing power of private technology companies over environmental knowledge and its infrastructures. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork at UN climate summits for over a decade, including as a team leader for the Earth Negotiations Bulletin (IISD), and is the lead author of UNEP's Frascati Principles on environmental data systems.