Against Documents: Traceability, Corruptive Mediality, and the Remaking of Environmental Accounting in Tropical Timber Supply Chains

The Planetary Praxis research group is delighted to host Assistant Professor Eduardo Romero Dianderas to present his work on deforestation and media.

At a time when unsanctioned land use change across the tropics is becoming a source of planetary anxiety and anthropocenic guilt, the governance of deforestation-linked supply chains is emerging as a transnational site of experimentation in environmental accounting, epistemic authority, and moral accountability. Central to this space is the proliferation of novel traceability regulations- the mechanisms through which the origin of a commodity is established - and the ways these regulations increasingly rely on new media architectures, modes of accountability, and aesthetics of verification.

In this talk, Eduardo Romero Dianderas examines a pervasive formulation in the grey literature on deforestation-linked supply chains: the claim that traceable sourcing requires a transition from “document-based” to “fact-based” modes of reckoning. Focusing on the evolving media infrastructures that have shaped the governance of tropical timber supply chains over the past twenty-five years, he explores the implications of this idealized transition for what counts as a “document”. He argues that traceability regulations rework narratives of immediacy and objectivity by recasting earlier documentary regimes as retrospectively corruptible forms of mediation intimately associated to the longstanding view of tropical rainforests as inscrutable spaces outside the purview of technocratic legibility.

This reconfiguration unsettles the infrastructural media foundations of twentieth-century international trade regulation and brings into view a more unstable terrain of state–corporate dependencies, standardized global aesthetics, and contested authorities in the governance of tropical rainforests. As traceability systems take on the form of mundane platforms for planetary accounting and accountability, he attends to the subtle media-ideological transformations that undergird the governance of contemporary deforestation-linked supply chains today.

Date: 20 May 2026, 14:30 BST

Location: Seminar Room of the Department of Sociology, Old Cavendish Laboratory, Free School Lane, University of Cambridge