‘From Space to Village’: How Climate Services Colonised Agrarian Futures

ABSTRACT

This article draws attention to the neglected visual construction of climate as a service , which we claim is central to understanding processes of datafication and financialisation at the core of adaptive development interventions in the era that followed the 2007–2009 global financial crisis. To do so, it foregrounds the notion of climate services —data‐driven guidance produced by satellites, sensors and increasingly Artificial Intelligence (AI)—and shows their epistemological and infrastructural centrality in configurating the contemporary climate‐development‐finance nexus. We situate our intervention in the political ecologies of adaptive development and build on scholarship exposing how adaptation depoliticises climate change often generates dispossession and erases alternative knowledges and futures. We anchor our argument in Latour's concept of inscriptions to show how the power of climate services, the legibility that they dispense and deny, must be understood as a regime of climate visibility . Such a regime makes adaptation legible as a market, configures needs and makes subjects visible in ways that foreclose political struggle and alternative futures. At the root of the aggressive focus on financial inclusion through conjoined climate/financial services , we see a double act of configuration that holds together ‘seeing like a satellite’ (Rothe 2017) and ‘seeing like a bank’ (Aitken 2017), rendering visible the centre‐figure of adaptive development, the resilient‐to‐be smallholder farmer. We examine their visual construction in agrarian settings through paradigmatic examples that we group in three co‐evolving stages: preparation (the inculcation of ‘climate smart mentalities’), datafication (the rise of Farming as a Service and the construction of subjects visible to finance) and fragmentation (the proliferation of AI and its debasement of subjectivities).