Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 110

2. Innovations in monitoring arrangements

Basically, this system of environmental monitoring is still intact in most
OECD countries and in development in many developing countries
(cf. Chapter 10 ). There is a constant process of further refinement
and improvement of basically the same monitoring and information-
generation practices and institutional designs, for instance, by includ-
ing more locations, more polluters and more substances and by putting
more emphasis on precautionary information generation (Cranor,
2005 ). But as informational processes and informational resources
become increasingly crucial in processes of environmental governance
throughout the 1990s, also new constellations of monitoring practices
and arrangements emerge, with a new set of questions. The most signif-
icant changes in environmental monitoring practices and arrangements
under conditions of informational governance can be summarised in
five points.
First, the scales of environmental monitoring are changing dramat-
ically compared to, say, two decades ago. Monitoring is increasingly
globalised. Examples are the monitoring systems related to advanced
model-based global information on greenhouse gasses or the global
monitoring by environmental satellites. 1 But also monitoring of defor-
estation and of wildlife - spreading, behaviour and even reproduction -
makes increasing use of global satellite and positioning systems. 2 This
increases the capacity to get on-the-ground data from anywhere at
any time, against increasingly lower costs. According to some, we are
approaching a time when virtually all pollutants will be susceptible
to tagging, tracking and measurement at relatively low costs (Allenby
et al., 2001 ). Although the construction of these global positioning and
data-collection systems is monopolised by northern actors, access and
use of these systems is less so but still runs along lines of the digital
divide, putting critical issues of informational democracy to the fore. At

1

See, for instance, http://www.temis.nl/ for global satellite-based monitoring of
real-time air pollution. The various Geographical Information Systems
(GIS)-based systems of monitoring and data reporting are also widening in
geographical scales. See also Richards et al. ( 2001 ) and Hansen ( 2000 ) for the
increasing possibilities of environmental monitoring by combining satellites and
remote sensing.

2

Such as the recent use of satellites in monitoring the positioning, movement and
reproductive behaviour of giant panda bears in China by Chinese researchers
and authorities.