Informational governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 99

6. State authority and postsovereignty
This brings us to a third critical issue involved in informational gover-
nance, one that is closely connected to a changing position of the envi-
ronmental state. Although, on the one hand, informational governance
responds to problems of state governance in an era marked by global-
isation, on the other hand, and at the same time it may contribute to
a further undermining of nation-state institutions on the environment,
of the environmental state. And as the nation-state is still seen by many
environmental advocates and social scientists as the core institution in
safeguarding the environment, any downsizing or marginalisation of
the nation-state and state power is met with a great deal of scepticism.
The sections and chapters so far have made clear that conventional
state regulation alone is increasingly ill-adapted to deal with contem-
porary environmental challenges in a globalised world order. But, by
the same token, it remains difficult to understand how informational
governance can really successfully replace the regulatory state. In that
sense, the worries and warnings of 'statist' environmentalists, such
as Eckersly (2004), Stevis and Bruyninckx ( 2006 ) and J anicke ( 2006 ),
against a stateless environmental governance should be taken seriously.
And they should be taken even more seriously when realising that
there are powerful actors with clear interests in informational rather
than state regulatory environmental governance, especially if this infor-
mational governance is deprived of any teeth (teeth such as trans-
parency, independent verification and auditing, and sanctions). Then
informational governance seems to become the equivalent of a deregu-
latory program towards voluntary environmental governance, in which
the powerful (information) players are given leeway in environmental
pollution.
In an earlier study (cf. Mol, Lauber and Liefferink, 2000 ; Mol, 2003 ),
we investigated to what extent all kind of new joint environmen-
tal policy-making initiatives (e.g., covenants, voluntary agreements,
labelling, environmental management systems, company environmen-
tal reports and other instruments by which the role of regulatory states
seems to change dramatically) should be interpreted as deregulatory
strategies of business and certain states sectors, or, rather, as strate-
gies of innovative political modernisation, leading to better adapted
and more effective environmental reform. The conclusions from that
study fit also the dilemmas around informational governance indicated