Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 117

citizen-consumers, potentially intruding in the private lives of many
citizens. At least some scholars claim that surveillance thus becomes
relevant for environmental monitoring and control, emphasising draw-
backs of informational governance.
Colonisation of the life-world?
In ecological modernisation theory, environmental monitoring is
identified as a crucial aspect of environmental reform programmes
(cf. Spaargaren, 1997 ; Huber, 1991 ). Monitoring of substance flows is
the first step in environmental reform, as it reveals where interventions
should be made in production and consumption systems. Increasing
monitoring efforts is thus desirable, as it will enhance information and
knowledge about the origins of environmental problems, which is a
precondition for implementing environmental protection measures. As
such, ecological modernisation scholars usually embrace the refinement
and expansion of monitoring arrangements.
But monitoring social practices not only increases the amount of
information and knowledge on environmentally relevant dimensions
of these very practices but also generates information on the behaviour
and whereabouts of the actors involved. Also with environmental mon-
itoring the danger exists that citizens are increasingly subjected to
surveillance and social control by systemic actors. In Habermasian
language, this can be referred to as the colonisation of the life-world:
the penetration of system elements - now via environmental monitor-
ing by state, institutional and economic actors - into the private life of
individual citizen-consumers. How serious and real is this threat under
the contemporary advancements of environmental monitoring?
Monitoring can be considered as a particular form of surveillance.
Dandeker's ( 1990 :2)definition of surveillance as “the supervisory and
information gathering capacities of the organisations of modern soci-
ety and especially of the modern state and business enterprises” clearly
reflects this idea of control by the system. With respect to surveillance,
social theories have been heavily influenced by the work of Foucault
( 1977 ), who considers surveillance to be a constitutive element of mod-
ern societies, replacing visible coercion with the sustained monitoring
of conduct. Surveillance is the key to discipline, to the internalisation
of rules. The Panopticon, Bentham's proposed architectural design for
a prison, best illustrates Foucault's reasoning. Allowing for permanent