Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 116

by a third party (often a state authority or a parastatal organisation,
but it also can be an independent organisation or a private interest
government organisation). These third parties can either monitor pro-
duction practices and producers/providers or consumption practices
and citizen-consumers (Figure 5.1 ).
Initially, in the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of environmental mon-
itoring schemes in OECD countries belonged to this last category (as
we stressed in Section 1 ), and then often in a traditional state-organised
mode. Partly, a diversification took place within these state-sanctioned
schemes in the 1990s, when new third parties took over conventional
state monitoring tasks. But, more important, as a result of various
developments (also recorded earlier) monitoring has diversified and
shifted to the other four categories (see Figure 5.1 ). This is, of course,
in line with the wider development in the environmental governance
literature (cf. Chapter 3 ).
4. Questions of surveillance and countersurveillance
The political economy of the information revolution points at the
dominance of large multinational media conglomerates with private
interests, state authorities collecting and storing increasing amounts of
information from citizens in order to refine surveillance, and transna-
tional producers and retailers who aim to get detailed insights in con-
sumption and buying behavioural styles and strategically reorient their
advertising campaigns accordingly. It is partly through the informa-
tion revolution that consumer sovereignty is at stake and that citizens
are controlled and surveyed in many aspects of life (cf. Chapter 2 ).
Monitoring and surveillance in general always have been associated
with control and power, especially in the line of Foucault's work. Until
now, environmental monitoring has hardly been associated with that,
as initially environmental monitoring practices were (i) too limited
in size, capacity and intensity; (ii) too much focused on institutional
actors such as industrial producers rather than on individual citizen-
consumers; and (iii) strongly focused on physical qualities instead of on
social behaviour. With the advancement, spreading and omnipresence
of environmental monitoring and information collection - as elabo-
rated earlier - questions with respect to surveillance also become rele-
vant in the field of environmental protection. Environmental monitor-
ing is increasingly approaching behavioural dimensions of individual