Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 109

product categories (food products, durable products, toys, etc.). Sec-
ond, these monitoring institutions collected information indirectly via
polluters or intermediary organisations. In a number of cases and coun-
tries, industrial and agricultural polluters and utility companies were
legally required to send in information on emissions and resource use
to state or parastatal organisations, linked with various strategies to
control and verify reliability and completeness of the data. Third, a
significant part of environmental data and information consisted of
indirect information calculated via models, processing schemes and
extrapolations. Based on known parameters environmental data were
estimated and calculated, in order to fill the gap of primary environ-
mental data. Financial costs, legal constraints, lack of sufficient and
high-quality personal and equipment, political unwillingness and the
sheer size of the monitoring task were behind the rapid developments
in data collections via modelling, calculations and estimations.
Ever since the start of systematic environmental measurements and
monitoring (organised) by state authorities, there has been a paral-
lel circuit of data collection and monitoring by independent scientific
institutions and environmental nongovernmental organisations. From
the start, the environmental monitoring activities of independent sci-
entists and environmental NGOs differed in at least three ways from
the official state-organised monitoring programs. First, the state run
environmental monitoring programs were - or at least had always the
intention to be - more systematic, routine and comprehensive, whereas
those of environmental NGOs were rather incidental, project-based,
short-run and focused on one or a few parameters. Second, the moni-
toring efforts of environmental NGOs and independent scientists were
usually part of a countervailing strategy, either by filling information
gaps that the state left behind or by presenting contradictory infor-
mation to pursue state authorities and polluters into clean-up actions.
Third, environmental data and information collected by environmental
NGOs and independent scientists were generally more accessible and
open for a wider public than state environmental information. Often,
the main goals for information collection and measurement by the for-
mer was transparency, public access and dissemination, in order to
generate sufficient public pressure on the powers that be. Also in these
days, (environmental) information was seen as a strategic resource in
environmental conflicts and obtaining and publishing environmental
information developed into a key strategy of environmentalists.