Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 126

proved to be a successful method for changing individual lifestyles,
several local and national governments have invested in the promotion
of the program, among others by paying for regional centres.
Although the main goal of the ecoteam program is to change indi-
vidual lifestyles, participants are asked to step up to utilities, compa-
nies and governments with questions, demands and comments. This
confronts producers and institutional actors with consumer concerns.
The information, knowledge and experiences of participants stren-
gthen their position vis- a-vis the 'systems of provision' and may
push for new consumer-provider relations. In the United States, GAP
has developed the 'Livable Neighborhood Program', in which par-
ticipants not only discuss individual consumption patterns but also
develop actions to improve their neighbourhood, hopefully result-
ing in “an effective neighbourhood mobilization and action tool to
assist local government in delivering services and improving the over-
all liveability of the community” (see GAP's Web site, http://www.
globalactionplan.org).
Ecoteams can be considered one of the best developed citizen-
consumer monitoring schemes. Yet the current design of the program
has its limitations. First of all, one can doubt whether or not the cur-
rent methods - using group meetings and social control - are suitable
for targeting large parts of the population, although the success of the
program - in terms of reducing the environmental impacts - seems
to be dependent on exactly these methods. Second, the environmental
impact of the program could be increased if the links between individ-
ual monitoring and the 'infrastructures of consumption' are tightened.
In other words, if consumers gain more insight in - and develop power
towards - the structures surrounding consumption, and come up with
collective activities and strategies to put these structural elements under
pressure, the ecoteam approach also might reach nonparticipants. But
then we are reaching the boundaries of the ecoteam approach and enter
in to more regular environmental and consumer NGOs (see Chapter 8 ).
Right-to-know: http://www.scorecard.org and others
Especially since the 1998 UN/ECE Århus Convention, the Rio Prin-
ciple 10 and the Access Initiative OECD countries have sped up reg-
ulation on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (see Chapter 6 ).
Strongly supported by ICT developments, this has resulted - first in