Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 93

consumption processes, and with the expansion (in quantity, time and
space) of information transmission, handling and processing capac-
ity, a more direct 'methodology' comes into reach to further articu-
late the environment in production and consumption. The articulation
and making visible of the environment via monitoring, measuring and
reporting in terms of various environmental (flow) indicators forms
a much more direct and complete articulation of environmental ratio-
nality. In addition, environmental information provides environmental
interest with a more independent (vis- a-vis economic interests) place in
production and consumption processes than economic valuation will
ever be able to do. Only when we articulate environment via informa-
tion - and thus independently from economic dimensions of money
and markets - it becomes evident that productivity is not exclusively
related to an economic rationality. The articulation of environmental
interests and rationality in production and consumption processes via
environmental information (rather than economic valuation) becomes
possible once information starts to play a crucial role in constituting
and transforming these production and consumption processes. This
is in fact exactly what happens in informational modes of environ-
mental reform. Although economic aspects of products, production
and consumption are visualised, emphasised, communicated and coor-
dinated via prices and markets, an informational mode of environ-
mental governance and reform points at the possibilities and practices
to use environmental information to visualise, emphasise, articulate,
communicate and coordinate ecological interests and rationalities in
products, production and consumption. It opens up possibilities for
further advancements in the process of ecological modernisation of
late modern societies.
To take the argument one step further, we should relate ecological
modernisation processes to processes of globalisation and time-space
compression. Processes of disembedding, in which production and con-
sumption, among others, are lifted out of their local place-bound struc-
tures and systems to be reorganised many miles away in different con-
texts, call for symbolic tokens to build trust over large distances. With
respect to economics, prices and money fulfil the need for such symbolic
tokens. If it concerns environmental protection, for instance, related
to global flows of (green) products, natural resources or waste when
production and consumption are separated in space and/or time, envi-
ronmental information is the basis for symbolic tokens that can bridge