Political governance has always been about fusing morality and moral decision-making with knowledge production and expertise (Rose and Miller 1992). Yet, recent technological advances have intensified the role of technocratic judgement and scientific and digital expertise in moral decision-making processes, with dramatic implications for government projects. In this special issue, we ask how the concept of ‘technomoral politics’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016) can help us shine light on the particular ways in which political governance is conducted today. Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma (2016) were the first to use the term ‘technomoral politics’ to refer to the processes whereby political tactics come to prioritise moral projects that are linked to technical interventions and policies. Here, we expand on the concept by analysing the role that not only technical interventions of law and policy but also technologically driven innovations play in the moral governance of societal struggles and challenges. Thus, we ask: What exactly is new or different about these forms of political rationality? How is the techno-cratisation of governance opening a distinct space for the expression of public moralities, and how are moral projects in turn justifying new ends to which technology and technocratic judgement are put? What forms of sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2009, 2015), utopias (Tutton 2018), and ‘techno-populism’ (Bickerton and Accetti 2021) as well as forms of resistance (Crawford 2016) and new collectivities (Bruun and Hasse 2022; van Oorschot and M'charek 2022) does this produce? And how do data-driven and technically transferable logics of policy-making advocate a shift from a politics of left and right to a morally absolutist approach of ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016; Koch 2024; Steur 2018)?
We explore how technomoral obsessions might well be a response to the increasing indecipherability of social life: as the complexity of today's societal and ecological challenges becomes increasingly difficult to understand and respond to, governments, international development agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) come to rely on overly simplified indicators to represent material life, while various actors often borrow from science, technology and technocratic language to contest dominant political orders (Molina et al 2021; Walter et al 2018). We consider how different actors – from government institutions to civil society actors to grassroots-based movements to individuals – develop, engage with and resist the various techniques and technologies of governance developed in the face of societal challenges, ranging from ever-growing pressures of global warming and environmental devastation to entrenched urban inequalities and austerity politics to an intensification of long- standing humanitarian disasters. Drawing on case studies from China (Bruckermann), India (van de Meerendonk), Ghana (Hird-Younger), Denmark (Bruun), the UK (Shore) and Mexico (Acosta), our special issue makes two interventions: first, we explore common themes of governance as they arise across a range of seemingly disparate areas, including those pertaining to the environment, humanitarianism, agriculture and urban regeneration. Second, this empirical endeavour leads to an analytical enquiry of a crucial development of our times: the management of some of today's pressing global challenges through a curious fusing of a morally righteous approach with technical-legal and technologically driven solutions.
Our argument is that the ‘technomoral’ has become an increasingly central site of governance in the current conjuncture, and one that will remain central in times to come. This conjuncture is marked by two developments. On the one hand, across many places in the world, politics is becoming more and more fused with an explicitly moralising language, as the liberal paradigm of detached and dispassionate policy-making taken for granted across much of the twentieth century in the West has been called into question by developments as diverse as the rise of populist movements (Edwards et al 2017); calls for ‘active’ or ‘participatory’ citizenship (Koster 2014; see also Bruun, Hird-Younger this issue); individual (financial) responsibility and thrift (Shore this issue); as well as an increasing drift to outright illiberal or authoritarian rule (Bruff 2014; Bruff and Tansel 2019; Davey and Koch 2021; Hyatt 2011; Laub 2021). On the other hand, this shift to the ‘morally righteous’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016) has happened at precisely the same time when both technical solutions and technological interventions hold out ever greater promises to solve society's biggest challenges. And yet, central as the ‘technomoral’ is to our times, its politics are far from clear. By fusing moral projects with the logic of seemingly objective and neutral language of digital data and algorithms, technomoral interventions not only disguise and further entrench structural inequalities faced by those at the margins of society. They also open unexpected spaces for political claim-making, as civic society groups, businesses and government bodies engage in digital and technologically driven projects of ethical self-making and transformation.
Fusing the Moral with the Technical and Technological
While the term ‘technomoral’ governance has recently entered anthropological debates, it has not yet been subject to systematic interrogation. Bornstein and Sharma (2016) use the term ‘technomoral’ politics to refer to the process whereby in ‘mixing the language of law and policy with moral pronouncement state and non-state actors posture themselves as defenders of rights and keepers of the public interest as they push their agenda and stake out distinctive positions’ (Bornstein and Sharma 2016: 77). Their conceptualisation of the ‘technomoral’ analyses how social movements, NGOs and state bodies have come to redefine the institutional boundaries of bureaucracy and law. Bornstein and Sharma's original formulation of the ‘technomoral’ directly influenced a number of further pursuits, particularly in relation to debates on neo-liberalism where anthropologists have come to explore ‘technomoral’ processes not only as a site of politics but also of governance more broadly. Anthropologists have begun to identify this curious mixing of the ‘moral’ with the technocratic and legal at work, including in the humanitarian politics of civic society actors in the Middle East (Kosmatopoulos 2014), with respect to party political rule in India (Steur 2018) and as concerns criminal justice interventions and surveillance technologies used against minoritised black and working class youth in austerity Britain (Koch 2024).
Of course, the fusing of moral projects with the language of bureaucracy and law is hardly new. As Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller (1992) already argued over three decades ago, modern political rationalities are intrinsically linked to the powers of expertise that evince their own moral and epistemological forms. Indeed, central to modernist projects of government and planning have always been the different ways in which populations and lands have been made legible through census data, standardised weights and measures, and other administrative ordering (Scott 1998). Whether in projects of modern reason, expertise and knowledge that supported colonial rule (Mitchell 1991; 2002) or population statistics that assembled categories, data, numbers and ideas about those who counted (Cool 2022; Hacking 1990), these projects must be seen in the light of the moral and political interventions that they enabled. And yet, while the collection of data has always been inseparable from projects of government, the media through which data are collected and registered have changed dramatically during the past century, from paper records to decentralised digital databases to today's centralised, comprehensive data platforms, held in the hands of either giant tech companies, states or both, as the articles on digital eco-governance in China (Bruckermann) and smart city governance in Denmark (Bruun) in this issue testify. These digital systems are both technologies of government and sites for contestation and negotiation of power and moralised state–citizen relationships.
Anthropologists of policy have shown that understandings of good and bad continue to be central to allegedly value-neutral processes of policy-making (Bear and Mathur 2015; Wright and Shore 1995; Shore and Wright 1997; 2011). Cris Shore and Susan Wright argued that policy is often represented as standing beyond morality; that is, as a rational and technical solution to a problem while producing certain moral understanding of persons and collectives (Shore and Wright 1997: 22–23). Likewise, anthropological studies of the ‘everyday state’ (Fuller and Bénéï 2000) have analysed the bureaucratic and technocratic system as a site of affect and emotions (Alexander 2002; Bear 2007; Koch 2018; Koch and James 2022; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Stoler 2008). And finally, anthropological interventions into technology have shown that technology is not neutral but tied to goal-oriented purposive and political actions (Bruun and Wahlberg 2022; Lemonnier 1992), even if the ways technologies actually end up working usually diverge from the intentions, plans and aspirations of those who developed them (Suchman 2007). The past decades have seen many anthropologists turn to studies of science and technology, and this has been paralleled by an ‘empirical turn’ in the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (Bruun and Wahlberg 2022: 9). Bruun and Wahlberg trace how material and operational aspects of technology merge with technologies and techniques of governance in the work of Michel Foucault and have shaped anthropological work focused on biomedicine and biotechnology, not least in the work developed by Paul Rabinow (1996). With the proliferation of digital technologies in all forms of political government, from accounting and auditing systems to population statistics to biometric data in policing and border control, contemporary studies of political governance must take these digital technological materialities into account.
Building on such studies of the intersections between the ‘moral’ and the ‘technical’, we argue that the role of the ‘technomoral’ has taken on a distinct place in contemporary governing projects. Across a range of ethnographic settings, the work of government officials and policy network participants (NGOs, advocates, activists, experts) lays bare a particular historical phase in the moral life of states (Fassin 2015). In our view, two key developments are particularly noteworthy. On the one hand, we explore how ‘moral entanglements’ (Acosta 2020: 146), moralities of debt, thrift and responsibilisation (Shore this issue; Trnka and Trundle 2017), and a language of ‘hyper- moralisation’ (Muehlebach 2012) have entered public debate with renewed force, replacing the dominant language of dispassionate and value neutral policy-making once central to liberal governance (however fraught these claims have always been). From the politics of austerity centred on claims of moral undeservingness and blame rolled out across many European states (Knight and Stewart 2016; Koch and James 2022; Muehlebach 2016) to discourses of humanitarian suffering central to international politics (Fassin 2011; Ticktin 2011) and increasingly also domestic policy-making (Koch 2024) to the populist and authoritarian style and rhetoric of politicians from Trump to Brexit (Bickerton and Accetti 2021; Edwards et al 2017; McGranahan 2017) to the management of public health pandemics in times of Covid-19 (Manderson et al 2021; Meinert and Seeberg 2022; see also Baehr 2008), it seems that public issues are increasingly debated through the idiom of an absolutist and morally righteous approach that distinguishes ‘right’ from ‘wrong’, ‘good’ from ‘bad’ and ‘winners’ from ‘losers’.
On the other hand, hyper-moralisation has gone hand in hand with an ever stronger drive towards technically and technologically driven decision-making (Butcher 2018; Rutkowski and Saunders 2018). In Bornstein and Sharma's original formulation of ‘technomoral governance’ (2016), the ‘techno’ aspect referred primarily to legal doctrine and processes (see also Sharma 2013). And indeed, some of our contributors focus on precisely that – including in their discussions of insurance policy in India (van der Meerendonk) and development discourses in Ghana (Hird-Younger). But claims to technical expertise extend beyond the law into other domains of objectified knowledge. In addition then to sites of bureaucracy and law, we also analyse the ways in which the rise of technomoral governance has developed out of, and in turn further entrenched, a neoliberal obsession with ‘evidence-based’ policy-making (Oliver et al 2014) and deregulation of states and expansion of markets (Shore this issue); audit culture with its metrics, indicators, rankings (Hird-Younger this issue; Shore and Wright 2021); ‘infopower’ through big data (Koopman 2019, Bruckermann, Bruun this issue). These have become ever more part of everyday life, from the use of biometric information (Olwig et al 2019), such as in the dispensation of welfare in India (Kapila 2022; Nair 2021), to the spread of everyday technologies of surveillance (Maguire 2012) and traffic safety (Monroe 2017) to the data-generated prompts one receives when using smart phones and watches, tracking and measuring our sleep, heart-rates, steps and other parts of everyday life (Danaher 2018; Ruckenstein 2022). In China, government bodies and corporations promise a simplified solution to environmental devastation by inviting citizens to become consumers of new ‘green’ apps that measure their carbon footprint and offer virtual rewards for those who have scored highly (Bruckermann). In Denmark, citizens’ contributions of their data to digital platforms are framed by technology developers as matters of public participation and trust. Yet, citizens also fight back the abstract and decontextual data relations and insist on embodied relationships of care and mutuality among neighbours and in everyday relationships with public authorities (Bruun). Meanwhile, in Mexico City, cycloactivists have been part of collective efforts to package demands for a greener and more sustainable city into ‘technomoral doctrines’ that offer easily digestible bundles of information with a clear assessment of what change should look like (Acosta).
The Politics and Effects of Technomoral Governance
On the face of it, the tale of technomoral governance produces a ‘social construction of success’ (Mosse 2005: 8) and a ‘success story of governance’ (Hird-Younger this issue), in which the dream of technical proceduralism and technologically driven solutions offers the route to a fair, just and democratic society. And yet, the examples we have discussed so far have already begun to show otherwise. Indeed, it seems no coincidence to us that the technomoral has become dominant in government schemes at precisely the time when authors have bemoaned a general crisis of democracy, with people speaking of the rise of a ‘post-democratic’ (Moore et al 2020; Crouch 2004) and ‘post-truth’ era (Keyes 2004; Mair 2017), in which politics has been reduced to a form of ‘zombie democracy’ (Koch 2017). Technomoral governance is part of what Georg Simmel had already at the turn of the twentieth century identified as calculability, a trend towards ‘transforming the world into an arithmetical problem and of fixing every one of its parts in a mathematical formula’ (1950: 416). Today, we see a further silencing of those substantive inequalities that are often blurred by algorithmic formula (AI Now 2018). Indeed, such is the power of algorithms according to some that scholars have spoken about the rise of algocracy as the defining governing mode of our times (Danaher 2016).
For anthropologists, the question of how techniques and technologies of rule cement, disrupt or create new forms of power hierarchies and relations is of course not new. They have long analysed how dominant policy paradigms further entrench inequalities and silence demands for collective change. Recent debates on humanitarianism, third sector governance and development politics provide a case in point. As Ilana Feldman and Miriam Ticktin (2010) have argued with respect to humanitarian discourses, the moral governance of suffering hinges on scientific and technical expertise that reframes questions of inequality, poverty and exploitation in depoliticising ways. Similarly, the politics of NGO governance has been critically analysed as holding echoes of colonial legacies and logics of saviourism and civilisation (Hird-Younger this issue), while at the same time working like an ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson 1990). Indeed, the slippery character of NGOs and the networks they form part of (DeMars 2005; Keck and Sikkink 1998) can stifle nuanced negotiations through the constant push towards defining problems through moral positionings rather than principled debates. Simple solutions qua technological ‘fixes’ are also proposed in the UK, where an alleged crisis of escalating criminality surrounding drug dealing and so-called ‘criminal exploitation’ has been managed through ‘gang matrixes’ and data-sharing exercises that link a vast range of government agents and frontline professionals (Koch 2024). Taken together, these processes speak to what Luisa Steur (2018), drawing on Comaroff and Comaroff (2006), calls the ‘displacement of the political into the legal’, and, we can add, financial, scientific and technological realms.
Judged from this perspective, technomoral governance loses any fold of neutrality, less even innocence (Ananny and Crawford 2018). On the contrary, as Benjamin has argued, from everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, accelerate and even further entrench inequalities (Benjamin 2019; Lowry 2018), while appearing neutral or even benevolent when compared to racist, colonial or otherwise oppressive practices from previous eras (Noble 2018; Reardon and TallBear 2012). The case of predictive policing is problematic because, as Roberto González explains, its basis on historical crime data makes its predictions ‘self-fulfilling prophesies resulting in increased surveillance over poor neighborhoods’ (2015: 13–14). The racist and sexist biases of facial recognition and generative AI software are painfully brought out in public scandals on a regular basis, such as the Google Photos incident misidentifying a photo of a pair of black friends as containing gorillas (García 2017; Seaver 2021: 772). Our special issue, too, testifies to how technomoral projects frequently further deepen inequalities. In Denmark, the fetishisation of public–private partnerships, technical solutions and an ethos of urban experimentation facilitate a deepening of processes of neo-liberalisation, with the participation of new types of experts, such as data programmers, engineers and designers (Bruun). Meanwhile, in China government bodies and corporations promise a simplified solution to state- sanctioned environmental devastation and deforestation by inviting citizens to become consumers of new ‘green’ apps that measure their carbon footprint and offer virtual rewards for those who have scored highly (Bruckermann).
And yet, this is not the whole story: there is also space for resistance and creative repurposing as a variety of actors come to beat the forces of technomoral control at their own game. From responses to racism and violence in the United States under the Black Lives Matter movement (Williams 2015), to the ways in which impoverished farmers in India protest government policies with the state's own logic of quantification (van de Meerendonk) to the enactment of more ‘long term relational accountability’ by NGOs in the face of the techniques of participation enforced by their donors in Ghana (Hird-Younger), different actors turn the very terrain of technomoral governance into a space for new political claim-making (Acosta). Even if the results are limited or fraught or mainly benefit the already privileged, we consider these spaces worth exploring further, for they can also be seen as the beginning of a different delineation of the ‘political’ that is yet to be fully grasped. The homes, organisations and workplaces where technologies of governance are used and developed are themselves spaces of everyday conflict and contestation where moral pursuits are negotiated and parried and new ones emerge (Bruun and Krause-Jensen 2022; Crawford 2016). This special issue addresses the rise and effects of technomoral governance, in both its empirical and conceptual dimensions.
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