Bugs in the System : Techno-Environmental Entanglements in Ghana's Climate Data Infrastructure

This article interrogates techno-environmental interactions in Ghana's climate data infrastructure. Building on ethnographic explorations that blur the boundaries between “nature” and “apparatus” in the Environmental Monitoring System at the Ghana Space Station's remote-sensing operations, and the computation of disaster scenarios in Ghana's National Disaster Management Organisation , we illustrate how Ghanaian climate experts critically orient toward insect species both as threats to measurement apparatuses’ mainframes and as potential solutions in the form of sentinel species providing additional confidence in view of data gaps. While both cases feature imaginations of insect species as “unfitting” in a technoscientific realm and favor containment instead, we argue that the two moments of environmentalizing data practices—with their specific techno-environmental interactions—attune Ghanaian experts’ vision to the continuous unevenness of global technoscientific relations, and in particular to racialized arrangements of funding, infrastructure development, maintenance, and repair.