Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 88

management and politics as the common denominator. For one, the
crucial actors involved in governance go beyond the state and include
consumers, customers, NGOs, communities, media actors, producers,
business associations, insurance companies and the like. Multiactors,
networks, alliances, subpolitics, partnerships and a dozen of other con-
cepts all try to catch state centrifugal tendencies. 5 Second, the dominant
nation-state level regulatory and governing actions are complemented
or sometimes even bypassed by supra- and subnational arrangements,
in which the nation-state is still part but no longer determining the con-
ditions, rules and pace of governance. In this subversion of nation-state
governance, information flows play a crucial role. To be more precise:
informational flows in governance are, on the one hand, increasingly
used by the state authorities as an answer to the failing authoritative
resources and the growing cross-border dimensions of governance; on
the other hand, the growing informational resources empower non-
state actors and make nation-state borders increasingly permeable and
significantly less relevant. In that way, the emergence of an informa-
tional mode of environmental reform is closely related to ideas of multi-
level and multiactor governance. 6 But these latter concepts miss part
of the essence of the transformation in (environmental) governance
that is at stake. New governance processes, practices and institutional
designs are not only different from the older ones in that more actors
and more levels are involved. It is also that the rules, resources and
domains of (environmental) struggles and management change: infor-
mational flows, processes and controversies start to move to the very
centre of governance. And that centripetal movement of information in
environmental governance comes along with the decreasing 'control'
of environmental information by the state. This dramatically democra-
tises environmental information in various ways. All kinds of actors
appear on the (virtual) stage of environmental information, whether
that be regarding information generation, information transmission

5

The growing popularity of cross-sectoral partnerships for sustainability (after
the 1992 UNCED summit in Rio de Janeiro and even more after the
Johannesburg summit of 2002) point to this lost state monopoly and their
growing dependency on nonstate actors in environmental governance
(cf. Glasbergen, Biermann, and Mol 2007 ).

6

As pointed out in Chapter 1 , this broad conceptualisation is strongly
represented in the environmental social sciences, for instance, in ecological and
political modernisation studies, in the ideas on subpolitics, and in the recent
policy science debates on multilevel and multiactor governance.