Environment and Planning A 2014, volume 46, pages 2125-2142 doi:10.1068/a469 Articulating social science in the wild of global natures? On economics and anthropology in transnational environmental politics Anders Blok Department of Sociololgy, Copenhagen University, 0ster Farimagsgade 5, Building 16, DK-1014 Kobenhavn K, Denmark; e-mail: abl@soc.ku.dk Received 8 January 2013; in revised form 1 May 2013 Abstract. Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively com pare the dem onstration and articulation form ats of two social science expert cultures— economics and anthropology—enrolled ‘in the wild’ of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. W hereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the ‘performativity of economics’ (Callon), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question—important to environmental expertise and politics—of how ‘local’ (particular) and ‘global’ (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in ‘other-than-Western’ contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. Keywords: performativity of social science, economics, anthropology, transnational environmental politics, multisited ethnography, contrastive comparisons Introduction: social sciences performing global natures? In contemporary environmental politics, expert knowledges can be seen to oscillate ambiguously between local and global concerns (Martello and Jasanoff, 2004). On the one hand, the rise to public significance since the 1970s of various global environmental issues— acid rain, ozone depletion, biodiversity loss, climate change—has shaped a growing need for knowledges of transnational applicability. This aspiration is reflected, amongst other things, in new knowledge institutions such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (eg, Miller, 2004). On the other hand, globalized scientific diagnoses of environmental change and associated regimes of governance often entail a (perhaps paradoxical) ‘rediscovery’ of particularity, in the sense of eliciting new local, traditional, and indigenous forms of knowledge. Environmental change professionals, in short, may pragmatically have come to realize that, as Sheila Jasanoff notes (2004, page 7), the abstract truths uncovered by science must “be received back into the humdrum rhythms of ordinary lives and localized experience in order to ‘work’ right.”