Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 83

To conceptually develop the notion of informational governance
of the environment, we draw a parallel with the informational econ-
omy and informational politics. Similar to the role of information in
almost all economic and political processes, information has always
been of importance in environmental governance processes, almost
irrespective of time and place. As information was there in the initial
economic exchanges in market economies (and before), information
played also its role during the birth of environmental governance in
the 1960s and 1970s. And parallel to the recent emergence of informa-
tional economy and politics in the Information Age, we can hypothe-
sise the recent emergence of an informational mode of environmental
governance, or informational governance of the environment. The
concept of informational governance then refers to the idea that infor-
mation is fundamentally restructuring processes, institutions and prac-
tices of environmental governance, resulting in essentially different
forms of environmental governance from the conventional modes.
Where conventional environmental governance highly relies on author-
itative resources and (nation-)state power, in informational governance
information is becoming a crucial (re)source with transformative pow-
ers. Information and knowledge processes start to become constituting
and transformative factors in environmental governance, instead of
just an enabling condition for formulating state policies. Consequently,
with that, the conventional environmental struggles, which have been
oriented around state laws, policies and measures since the late 1960s,
are increasingly relocated around access to, production and verification
of and control over information. This shift in resources and locations
of power struggles coincides with a shift in the dominant position of
the state in environmental policy making; states have to give in as reg-
ulatory monopolists, in favour of a diversity of interdependent actors
in multilevel networks constructed around flows of information.
The fact that we can articulate these changes in environmental gov-
ernance does not mean a rather sudden switch away from conventional
governance and fully towards new modes of informational governance.
Not unlike Castells's notion of an informational economy, in which the
'old' economy continues to play a role, and the idea of informational
politics in which conventional parties, political ideologies and political
control to some extent continue, the idea of informational governance
of the environment would not include the end of conventional state
environmental governance in the foreseeable future. As we point at