Flows of Standards and Materials: Road Expertise and the Microscopic Struggle of Nature and Infrastructure

Flows of materials involved in infrastructure maintenance have raised growing environmental concerns. This article discusses the role played in the perpetuation of such flows by the contemporary production of expertise dedicated to road maintenance in France. Confronted with various destabilizations of infrastructural order, civil engineers strive to strengthen standards for the assessment of public action. Their approaches to materials re-enact an agonistic division between nature and infrastructure, analyzed here as a small-scale instantiation of the nature/culture divide. The relationship between this ontology of materials and the delineation of institutional responsibilities helps explain the resistance of modern infrastructures to environmental criticism.