The Satellite’s Gaze: A Postcolonial Commentary on Development Economics

Satellite data has grown in popularity among developmental economists over the last two decades. It is heralded to circumvent informality and data manipulation, and it promises unique visibility on global poverty. How might the use of satellite data in developmental research reconfigure knowledge production of the Global South in the Global North? I offer a preliminary discussion, drawing on post- and de-colonial work of North-South developmental relations, poverty, visibility and cartography, and data politics and surveillance. My goal is not to survey the still-early instances of satellite-driven research; instead, I locate the turn to satellite data in postcolonial narratives of developmental economics, and I theorize its consequences on Northern understandings of development, space, and poverty.

Using a network analysis of citations, I find that satellite imagery technologies are forged and propagated by economists in North America and Europe, but used predominantly to study Asia, Africa, and South and Latin America, amplifying the distance between the people studying and the people studied. Indeed, the most influential publications are those written by economists in the North and study Africa. In addition, a cursory examination of the most central publications in the global North and global South using satellite data suggest that the North is invested in themes of global visibility, poverty, and “Africa” whereas the South is more invested in locally contextualized, within-nation studies, especially on land use. While the new era of satellite data may offer promising new possibilities for social scientific research, it may also serve to reinforce pre-existing hegemonies: Northern satellite research on global poverty arguably extracts data from and about marginalized regions, disempowers actors it strives to "see" by prohibiting participation, and reinforces problematic epistemologies of space and poverty.