Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 98

Hence, with informational governance uncertainties are becoming an
inherent part of environmental protection activities. And these uncer-
tainties are a structural part of decision making at all levels, from indi-
vidual consumers and household, via firms that want to green them-
selves, to policy and political actors and institutions.
The background and explanations of such a more critical analysis
of information in environmental reform can be traced back to the Risk
Society thesis, the literature on social constructivism, and the more
recent complexity variants of the sociology of networks and flows,
which have been reviewed in Chapters 2 and 3 .
Although acknowledging the significant contributions of the Risk
Society literature and the sociology of networks and flows to our under-
standing of how global information (and other) flows 'structure' the
complexity of late modern society in dealing with - among others -
environmental risks, we should not interpret this only in terms of rad-
ical uncertainty and nongovernability. The growing feelings and expe-
riences of uncertainties and unpredictabilities, the ongoing revisions
of knowledge claims, and the continuing controversies in environmen-
tal regulation come along with new informational practices, arrange-
ments and institutions that make such uncertainties manageable and
provide closures for controversies. We can witness new actors and pro-
cedures emerging on the stage of informational governance to form
new arrangements and institutions in dealing with uncertainties, differ-
ent knowledge claims and informational controversies. Beck's reflexive
modernity analysis, for instance, has set the scene for a whole area of
studies, suggestions and - to some extent - practices for alternatives
to 'normal science' approaches: citizen's science (Irwin, 1995 ), demo-
cratic science, lay actor involvement, dialogical science, participatory
decision making and so on. In a similar way, uncertainties have trans-
formed policy and governance processes, as transparency, account-
ability, participation and independent verification become key issues
in struggles around informational governance, instead of the state and
science monopolies that characterised environmental governance in the
preinformational governance era. So, instead of mourning over the loss
of states and science to decide unilaterally or focus on the stalemate
positions caused by these radical uncertainties of global complexities,
we should investigate the institutional innovations that enable things
to move on, and then assess the values, strengths and shortcomings of
these new institutional arrangements.