Monitoring, surveillance and empowerment - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 131

6. Conclusion
Environmental monitoring has changed dramatically since the 1970s
and 1980s. Initially, there existed basically a state-sanctioned, clock-
time collection of natural science data, with relatively simple technolo-
gies, reported selectively in hard copies, all within the borders of a
nation-state. Now, we see a highly diverse set of instant (or timeless
time) data-collection practices at various levels (from global to micro),
by numerous actors, with increasingly advanced technologies (such as
satellites and nanotechnology), and reported via the Internet. This has
not only resulted in increasing amounts of environmental data and
information becoming available. The kind of data and information,
the ownership and availability, the circulation of data and the surveil-
lance of human practices have all changed dramatically. In addition to
outlining these changes in this chapter, we have balanced the idea that
this would only result in increased surveillance of institutional actors
over citizen-consumers, and noticed that it also means larger potentials
for countersurveillance.
The consequences of these changing environmental monitoring
arrangements are to be felt in environmental governance, in which state
and nonstate actors position and relate themselves in various ways to
environmental information in the politics, debates and struggles on
environmental challenges. The next chapters especially focus on how
states and state agencies, private and commercial firms and civil soci-
ety organisations work with information in their environmental reform
practices. Here, the focus switches from data and information collec-
tion - the main subject of this chapter - to the application and use of
environmental information in environmental governance.