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Within the context of the so‐called green energy transition, the mining industry has successfully repositioned itself as a facilitator of, rather than an impediment to, a sustainable future. Underlying the success of this claim is a discourse of sustainability that, on the one hand, equates sustainability with decarbonisation and, on the other hand, insists that the rapid expansion of renewable energy generation and storage infrastructures is the only viable way to decarbonise. Reflecting specifically on the mining industry's increasingly central role within this discourse, this article identifies three key modalities of decarbonisation, each of which involves energy storage as an important component: decarbonisation through mining; decarbonisation of mining; and decarbonisation of mines themselves. Analysing these modalities through the emergent literature on the political ecology of storage, which highlights both the spatial and temporal elements of storage infrastructures, we argue that the reinforcement and expansion of green extractivist logics is driven, in part, by the idea that extractivism can and will unlock new spaces and temporalities of decarbonisation through the installation and expansion of energy storage infrastructures. Consequently, energy storage in mining decarbonisation is not only a form of accumulation, but a condition of possibility for sustaining and generating new forms of capitalist extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outsize influence of asset managers raises important questions about the relationship between fund managers and the companies in which they are invested, with recent theorists of asset manager capitalism suggesting an emergent disinterest in the performance of individual firms among large asset managers. Investors' growing focus on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data in financial decisions offers one window into this relationship. Drawing on interviews with the ESG team and a group of portfolio managers at a large European bank, I argue that ESG analysis is seen as valuable not because of some unique social, environmental, or even financial benefits, but because it helps asset managers more effectively govern the companies in which they are invested by objectifying and depoliticizing their interventions in the governance of invested companies. This contributes to emerging theories of asset manager capitalism by calling attention to the strategies asset managers develop to exercise control over invested companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable finance is generally understood as the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into the investment process. Based on participant observation of sustainable finance and impact investing conferences between 2015 and 2020, and a series of interviews with the sustainability team and several portfolio managers at a large European bank in 2018 and 2019, I show how the compulsion to define and measure sustainability indicators reflects the emergence of the market itself as an ethical subject, one that is capable of making the most efficient, and thus the most ethical, decisions. This has implications for ethical intersubjectivity in sustainability more broadly. I situate this claim alongside recent work in anthropology and geography on the translation of social and environmental values into financial values, as well as on work in the anthropology of ethics and its intersection with the anthropology of finance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an ambivalence within political ecology about whether the unequal power relations that emerge from many development projects are intended or unintended. This ambivalence is a result of an empirical focus on the effects of these programs on target communities, as opposed to an empirical focus on the people who are responsible for developing those programs. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork among people tasked with designing, promoting, and enforcing sustainability standards in global agricultural supply chains, I argue that the empowerment of multinational corporations and well-funded environmental NGOs that characterizes market-oriented sustainability programs is, in fact, intentional. This intention reflects the belief among sustainability professionals that the intersection of western scientific expertise with the dynamics of "the market" is the most effective way to promote sustainability in global supply chains, and to generate global sustainability in a more general sense. Concepts like "stakeholder engagement" and a commitment to flexibility and accommodation in the development and adoption of social and environmental standards are examples of what I call euphemistic sustainability, which shifts critical attention away from a balance of power that is increasingly tilted toward private interests, even as that imbalance remains an intended outcome of non-state market-driven governance systems like ostensibly voluntary sustainability standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainability professionals believe their work has positive social and environmental impacts in the "real world," but they recognize that their impactfulness is contingent on a number of other factors, especially the willingness of other, typically more powerful actors to consider their findings and implement their recommendations. In this article, I develop the notion of "impact pathways" to think about the relationship between paths, maps, travelers, terrains, and ethics in the context of what my informants regularly refer to as the sustainability "landscape." I show how the interpretation of a map and the choice between different possible paths can be partially explained by an actor's particular ethical framework, in this case something I identify as the sustainability ethic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of global agrocommodity supply chains, the sociotechnical imaginary of neoliberal sustainability is characterized by a belief that the impactfulness of market-based solutions like fair trade standards and voluntary certification schemes relies on the transparency and traceability of those supply chains. Achieving transparency and traceability, however, relies on the collection, analysis, and dissemination of data about numerous social, environmental, and economic factors, data that are generated through increasingly intensive regimes of high-tech monitoring and surveillance. For my interlocutors, who work to design and promote these standards, surveillance comes to be seen as not only justified but also expected and necessary, leading to the tacit categorization of certain spaces (and the human and non-human actors who populate them) as surveillable. In the case of sustainability standards specifically, which are imposed almost exclusively on producers in the Global South, the notion of surveillable space raises important questions about race and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The articles in this issue of I Culture, Agriculture, Food and Environment i represent a diverse set of both empirical and conceptual interventions into the relationship between food, sustainability, and local socio-economic conditions. Through Wangchuk's account, the sustainability of yak farming in Bhutan emerges as a multi-faceted issue inextricable from global climatic changes, national land management policies, and local social and cultural values. Like nutrition, approaches to alternative food systems must take into account the diverse experiences and ideologies of food justice. [Extracted from the article]