Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 94

this time/space gap. Articulating environmental rationalities via infor-
mational devices and systems is then much more 'precise', complete
and adequate than via economic signals or tokens. Hence, environ-
mental protection and reform under conditions of globalisation require
environment-specific symbolic tokens, and informational devices fulfil
that need; ecolabels, certification systems, standards, product infor-
mation systems and webcams are a few examples. Or, to put it in
Castellian language, informational flows connect the environment in
the 'space of flows' with the environment in the 'space of place'. In that
sense, Buttel ( 2006 ) correctly noticed continuities between the ecologi-
cal modernisation literature and the new sociology of (environmental)
flows. With the ability to abstract and disembed environment from its
sensory experiences and local contextualities and include it in symbolic
tokens based on information, it can be transferred through time and
space and is thus included in the space of flows.
This potential - and also actuality as we will see in the follow-
ing substantive chapters - of articulating and including environmental
protection and interests in the 'space of flow' has one further analyti-
cal/theoretical consequence. The environment can no longer be inter-
preted as only a passive place-based recipient that is constantly bru-
talised by global capitalism from the space of flows. It also becomes a
constructive element that constitutes and greens the 'space of flows'.
With the idea of informational governance of the environment and
the inclusion of it also in the 'space of flows', we have deliberately
moved away from a too structuralistic, deterministic and systemic
framing of environmental brutalisation in global modernity. Rather,
we emphasised the innovations, new arrangements and 'voluntarist'
opportunities lying ahead of us through new modes of environmental
governance in the Information Age. No matter how useful and neces-
sary such a reframing is, we should not lose sight of some of the critical
issues around informational politics that were put so strongly on the
agenda by, among others, Castells. If not, we run the risk of fram-
ing informational governance too much in a managerial language, not
unlike some of the writers on the Information Society did some decades
ago. In the following four sections, I will emphasise four major crit-
ical points of informational politics on the environment: new power
relations, uncertainties, the undermining of sovereign states and global
inequalities.