Threshold ontology

Real-time sensing, agrarian governance, and the chronopolitics of sustainability

Bibliographic Data

ID24227204
AuthorsMichael Carolan (0000-0002-2691-0454, Colorado State University)
Year2026
Publication date2026-10-12
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueEnvironment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/02637758261498999
OpenAlexW7221527515
LanguageEN
References cited54

Real-time sensing technologies are increasingly promoted within highly capitalized and platform-integrated agricultural systems as solutions to ecological crisis, promising sustainability through precision, predictive coordination, and continuous responsiveness. This article interrogates the ontological and political work performed by that promise. It develops the concept of threshold ontology to describe a regime in which phenomena become real, urgent, and governable when they cross predefined quantitative thresholds, triggering operational intervention. Drawing on science and technology studies, critical agrarian studies, and chronopolitics, the analysis argues that contemporary sensing infrastructures reorganize temporality by coupling measurement to intervention through systems of triggerability embedded within processes of data-mediated governance. This coupling stratifies who and what are interruptible, visible, and responsible across actors and processes. In doing this, it privileges deviation management at the expense of structural processes such as labor precarity, land concentration, groundwater depletion, and agrarian dependency. Agriculture is an analytically revealing site because ecological, labor, and capital temporalities intersect within platform-mediated production systems that tie sensing infrastructures to supply-chain coordination, financial risk management, and labor surveillance. The article reframes sustainability as a chronopolitical question concerning how infrastructures rank temporal processes, define crisis, and shape which forms of structural transformation become politically imaginable.

agricultural governance · chronopolitics · Environmental crisis · Financial risk management · groundwater depletion · labor surveillance · land concentration · precarious employment · Precision agriculture · real-time sensing · Structural change · supply chain coordination · Sustainability · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Digitalization and Economic Development in Agriculture · Smart Agriculture and AI

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