Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 82

2. Informational governance and the environment
As has been stated, information has always been of importance in
environmental protection and reform. But since the 1990s, something
special is at stake, with the role of information in society's attempts
to protect the environment. To clarify our central line of argument,
it is most useful to draw on Castells's ( 1996 : 21) distinction between
an information economy and an informational economy. According
to Castells, information economy refers to the role information plays
in economic processes. Information, in its broadest sense of commu-
nication of knowledge, has always been critical in all economies. The
collection and generation of information and knowledge and the com-
munication and exchange of information played an important role
in organising markets and economic processes of production and con-
sumption. Informational economy ,incontrast, refers to a specific form
of social organisation in which information generation, processing and
transmission become fundamental sources of productivity and power.
The idea of informational economy is not just referring to the impor-
tance of information in economic processes, but points at a fundamen-
tal transition of the economic order, resulting in a new technological
paradigm and a new social organisation (often referred to as electronic-
information-communication technology and the network society). The
economy has become informational because the productivity and com-
petitiveness of units or agents in this economy fundamentally depend
on their capacity to generate, apply and process information. And here
Castells, and with him various other scholars (see Chapter 2 ), point
at a historical discontinuity. The emergence of a new technological
paradigm, organised around flexible and powerful information and
communication technologies and linked to processes of globalisation,
results in a fundamentally different social and economic order. This
Information Age is characterised by a global informational economy.
Although rooted in the economy, these transformations have,
according to Castells, also significant wider consequences: for politics
and governance, for culture and cultural institutions, for social move-
ments and so on. Thus, informational politics and governance are in
some respects fundamentally different from conventional politics and
governance - as was elaborated in Chapter 2 .Itisfrom this insight
that we develop the idea of a new informational mode of environmen-
tal reform.