Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 122

systems” (Marvin et al., 1999 : 113). In conventional or producer mon-
itoring schemes, the collected data is given in technical units. Electricity
use is expressed in kWhs, gas consumption in joules and water con-
sumption in cubic meters. Furthermore, reporting and dissemination of
monitoring results often takes place only once a year, on an aggregated
basis. The bills that are supposed to give information on individual or
household consumption levels are quite complex. Such monitoring and
related reporting schemes are not meant to - and thus do not - provide
citizen-consumers with a detailed understanding of what is going on
within their households, for they do not link information on consump-
tion of water and energy to the actual practices of consumption that are
recognizable for citizen-consumers: washing, cleaning, heating, light-
ning, cooking and the like. In addition, these data presentations often
fail to give consumers an understanding of their realised savings, pos-
sible savings per social practice and the environmental effects caused
or prevented.
Thus, adequate citizen-consumer monitoring does not only differ
from conventional monitoring in the subject and object of monitoring,
but also in, among others, the technical devices, reporting schemes,
and the type of information collected. Only then is citizen-consumer
monitoring empowering.

5. Citizen-consumer empowerment

Four case studies on citizen-consumer environmental monitoring shed
some light on their diversity, and how informational governance is not
necessarily only linked to surveillance and system dominations, but can
as much be part of countersurveillance and democracy. 8

Energy monitoring

As introduced earlier, in most OECD countries domestic energy mon-
itoring is done via individual metering of households by energy com-
panies. Monthly or annual bills of utility companies feed back infor-
mation on energy use from the producers/providers to the consumers.
Although such systems of metering and billing can form important

8

Some of these examples draw on our earlier research and publications: van den
Burg, Mol and Spaargaren ( 2003 ) and van den Burg ( 2006 ).