Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 85

and institutions having access to and thus being able to make use of
information; and the time-space compressing of information flows in
a globalising world order. 2 The new information and communication
technologies are crucial in enhancing the capacities and abilities of
monitoring, measurement and collection of environmental informa-
tion. ICT also helps in the transparency and making (publicly) avail-
able environmental information to ever-wider audiences by increasing
numbers of individuals and organisations. And ICT greatly stimulates
and eases the access, use and application of environmental knowledge
and information in economic, political and social processes. Through
all of these ICT-induced dynamics, information gains in 'power' and
impact as a resource in structuring social practices of environmen-
tal protection and reform, vis- a-vis other authoritative, economic and
technological resources.
With ICT, the timescape of information processing changes dramat-
ically, generally towards time compression. Environmental monitor-
ing, information dissemination, and information controversies seem
to happen in increasingly shorter time, towards what Castells has
labelled 'timeless time'. Automatic monitoring systems are more and
more directly related to Web pages, webcams register and disseminate
instantly production circumstances many miles away, information on
environmental pollution scandals can travel in no time around the
world, calling for and causing reactions from local communities and
authorities next door and from global consumers and nation-states far
away.
As such informational governance is tightly connected to a new tech-
nological paradigm, based on ICT and the Internet. The emergence
of a fundamentally new, informational mode of environmental gov-
ernance is, of course, not caused by only the ICT revolution. Such a
claim would make our analysis rather technologically deterministic.
The fact that new technologies make environmental information more
widely, easily and more quickly accessible, available and processable
does not automatically connote that information processes and institu-
tions restructure environmental governance. Three other parallel - and

2

It goes without saying that these variables have not the same loading for all
countries (cf. Zook, 2001 ; Gunaratne, 2002 ), resulting in geographical
variations in the importance and relevance of informational governance. With
respect to the environment, Chapter 10 deals with informational governance in
information-poor environments, focussing on two non-OECD countries.