Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 115

firms within global networks and product or value chains (related to,
for instance, quality control, product liabilities and labelling schemes)
or in geographical areas/regions (such as industrial parks or estates).
Chapter 7 especially elaborates on monitoring and informational prac-
tices in this category, showing that a rich diversity of monitoring
practices and schemes goes behind this category, triggered and pres-
sured by various sources and factors. In the second category, producer
power and surveillance, producers and other institutional actors (such
as utility companies, retailers) collect environmental information and
knowledge on citizen-consumers, consumption and citizen behaviour
for their own use. Such monitoring schemes include, for instance,
traditional utility-related metering systems, marketing investigations
on (biological) products, mobility behaviour, etc. These monitoring
schemes have enabled demand side management strategies in environ-
mental governance, but the major risk of these schemes is the possible
loss of privacy and increased surveillance of individuals, on which I
will elaborate later in this chapter. The third category, reflexive moni-
toring, comprises monitoring schemes in which citizen-consumers - or
their representative organisations in civil society such as environmen-
tal NGOs, consumer organisations and community organisations -
monitor themselves, their households, their consumption levels and
their behaviour. Monitoring then becomes part of reflexivity, in which
agents reflect on their daily routines to develop alternative action pat-
terns that address the environmental consequences of these former
routines. In the fourth category, which can be labelled countersurveil-
lance, we find monitoring schemes and arrangements in which individ-
ual citizen-consumers and (more often) consumer, environmental and
other social organisations collect data on pollution levels, emissions,
water quality, product quality or transport performance, to name but
a few. These monitoring schemes provide citizen-consumers with the
opportunity, the resources and the power to step up to providers, pro-
ducers or state institutions and demand and enforce better environmen-
tal performance, increased product quality and more transparency. We
can speak of countersurveillance, as citizen-consumers or civil society
organisations have acquired and use the means to monitor and influ-
ence other actors (most notably producers and state authorities) more
than incidentally against the wishes of these actors. In the last cate-
gory, labelled state-sanctioned monitoring, monitoring is carried out,
organised or sanctioned neither by consumers nor by producers, but