Contested quantification for planetary health – A sociotechnical analysis of Bangladesh’s water salinity monitoring infrastructure

In climate change and planetary health, the datafication of natural processes and their effects on human health is gaining importance, not least due to data’s role in international funding mechanisms. In Bangladesh, water salinity has become the focus of much research and could emerge as an asset to access climate funding. Taking Bangladesh’s water salinity monitoring infrastructure as a case study, this paper problematizes the “neutrality” of water salinity data. Adopting the methodological approach of an “infrastructural inversion”, we foreground the relational nature of data production. The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Bangladesh along the data production chain. We highlight how the involvement of a large variety of actors gave rise to vastly different data infrastructures and explicate the influence of actors’ “problematization”. We further illustrate the importance of pre-existing materiality for the implementation of data collection systems on the ground and their power to influence whose reality is represented and whose is left out. Discussing these findings in the context of the international development sector reveals the complex interplay between the dual function of data as a mediator of
knowledge and proof of legitimacy. Attention is paid to the tendencies of perpetuating patterns of exclusion and inclusion through data in a setting of project-based funding. We thereby provide global health researchers, policy
makers and development practitioners with a detailed case study whilst stimulating reflection on the hegemony of datafication.