Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 87

(harmonisation of) information processing is global, interpretation of
environmental information is global and information circulation and
consumption are global.
Third, and closely related to globalisation processes, the redefinition
of states has far-reaching consequences for environmental governance,
not in the last place as it jeopardises the state's long-time comfortable
position as managers of public goods, as safeguarders of general inter-
ests and as protectors of the marginalised. 4 With respect to these tradi-
tional/conventional state tasks, nation-state institutions were increas-
ingly questioned in the 1980s for their (i) deficiency in sustaining trust,
(ii) loss of legitimacy and (iii) poor effectiveness. During the 1990s,
states have seen their authoritative monopoly and their sovereignty
being endangered, both domestically and internationally, in an increas-
ing number of domains (including the environment). Throughout the
1990s, it became increasingly clear that state authorities were depen-
dent on global developments as well as on nonstate actors in success-
fully developing and implementing policies, programs and activities.
Under conditions of globalisation states lost the ability and willing-
ness to detail the patterns, regularities and order of societies, and
increasingly turned to regulating mobilities and ensuring the conditions
for favourable interaction processes and flows. As Zygmunt Bauman
( 1987 ) puts it, a transformation took place from a gardener state to
a gamekeeper state. These redefinitions of the state include - but are
by far not limited to - the management of the environment, which
has been an undisputable central task and monopoly of the state since
the 1960s. Thus, top-down authoritarian state environmental policies
were replaced by facilitative, participatory and consensus building pro-
cesses in which states share part of their decision-making capacity with
other actors. The emerging literature on governance in the 1990s and
the present decade (cf. Treib et al., 2007 ) has focused on the diversifi-
cation of actors and institutional arrangements in local, national and
global arenas of governance, with the redefinition of the state in policy,

4

Although some scholars interpret this as the withering away of the
'environmental state', in most industrialised and industrialising market
economies, we cannot witness a sharp decrease in state institutions on the
environment, in legal and regulatory activities of these state institutions, or in
state capacity for the environment (except for a few incidental cases such as
Russia). Or, in other words, in general OECD countries are not moving towards
an environmental deinstitutionalisation with respect to the state.