Making Digital–Ecological Transitions Work: National STI Strategies and the Labour of Strategic Translation

Today, expressions such as “twin transition” and “AI for sustainability” frame the coupling of digital technologies and ecological goals as a self-evident policy direction. Yet this coupling is neither neutral nor uniform. Within national STI strategies, circulating ways of problematising transition intersect with scientific and technological capacities, sectoral practices, public investment structures, and data and standards infrastructures, shaping what counts as a legitimate research agenda or a plausible technological pathway. This panel asks which field practices and expertise are recognised as credible responses to transition, and how data gaps, material costs, and field-level constraints are marginalised, reworked, or absorbed as grounds for further investment.

The panel therefore invites empirical studies of the translation work through which these strategic couplings become workable in specific settings. It asks how similar transition vocabularies become attached to organisational forms and technological directions through situated assemblage work within national STI systems. Which actors, from field-level actors and infrastructure operators to firms, research organisations, and public authorities, gain authority to define the transition problem, and who carries the labour of making the proposed solution feasible? This labour is approached not as a secondary effect of digital–ecological articulation, but as one of the conditions of its durability. Contributions from sociology, political science, history, STS, and neighbouring fields are welcome, whether comparative or single-case, insofar as they situate national STI strategies within sociotechnical assemblages that make certain futures calculable and investable while redistributing what counts as valuable, feasible, and worth supporting.