Limits to measurement: Rethinking the role of monitoring in environmental governance

Abstract

The paper explores the role of measurement in securing sustainable and just environmental governance. Examining New Zealand's ambitious initiative to monitor and improve its freshwaters, I identify four ‘limits’ to realising the promise of measurement: scarce resources, ontological ambiguity, epistemological narrowing, and decision-making logics. Expounding these limits helps to identify the costs of, and alternatives to, current visions of science-driven environmental governance reform. By reckoning with these limits rather than ignoring them, a new modus operandi for environmental science can be composed that is both more practically ambitious and less vulnerable to failure.