Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 86

partly interdependent - developments in late modernity coinduce the
growing relevance of informational processes in (environmental) gov-
ernance.
Second, there is an intimate relation between the ICT revolution
and processes of globalisation, as has become evident from the various
scholars discussed in Chapter 2 . The geographical stretching and time
compression and acceleration of all kinds of social and economic pro-
cesses draw upon and are enabled by information technologies. This
is not fundamentally different in (environmental) governance, as it is
for economic processes. But such globalisation processes also increase
the importance of information in coordination and decision making
in private and public institutions and arrangements. Information flows
crossing sectors and national boundaries 'fit' into globalisation dynam-
ics, especially as some other resources prove to be much more place-
bound. The deterritorialised flow character of information matches
with the increasing importance of all kinds of flows and mobilities
in structuring global modernity: capital, money, goods, persons and
materials. These global flows and mobilities also touch on the environ-
ment: in an age of globalisation environmental change can no longer
be defined in the nation-state container. The environmental profile of
the new millennium is predominantly one of global (environmental)
change. 3 The causal interaction patterns, networks and structures that
are at the foundation of much environmental stress are fundamen-
tally global, as are increasingly the manifestations of environmental
stress. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to define environmen-
tal problems in terms of only place-bound localities or only at the
national level (cf. Mol 2001 , for a more elaborate argument about
this). Consequently, environmental governance is bound up with glob-
alisation, which changes the character of environmental governance. It
is not only that the nation-state loses some of its power and monopoly
position, through which nonstate-based actors, resources and rules
(such as information) become more important in environmental gov-
ernance (see later in this chapter). But also informational processes
become globalised in various ways. Environmental information pro-
cesses move beyond the level of (single) nation-states and become truly
global. Increasingly, environmental information sources are global, the

3

Buttel and colleagues ( 1992 ) were among the first to notice the transformation
“from limits to growth to global change.”