Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 132

6 Environmental state
and information politics
1. Introduction
In Chapter 5 , attention was focused on (innovations in) monitoring
schemes and arrangements for obtaining environmental information.
In this chapter, we begin by shifting our attention to governance
through information: the informational strategies and activities to
redirect social practices into more environmentally sound pathways.
Although there are various actors involved in informational strate-
gies and governance, this chapter will put state organisations central,
whereas the following chapters pay more attention to economic actors
and the private sector (Chapter 7 ), to environmental NGOs and civil
society (Chapter 8 ) and to the media (Chapter 9 ). Thus, although this
chapter provides crucial insights in the origin and start of informa-
tional governance and its dilemmas, to fully understand the dynamics
and scope of informational governance, this chapter falls short. The
subsequent chapters must also be read in order to grasp its full breadth
and complexity.
In conventional analyses of the role of information in state environ-
mental policy making, the key problems are identified as information
gaps, transaction costs for obtaining adequate information and own-
ership of information (see Chapter 1 ). Most legal and economic schol-
ars have focused on how to overcome these problems in strengthen-
ing sound environmental governance. Some of the monitoring changes
analysed in Chapter 5 are of key importance in doing so: more data
availability, lower data collection and processing costs and larger pro-
liferation of data and information. But this chapter moves beyond
such a straightforward idea that more, better and cheaper informa-
tion is automatically resulting in improved environmental governance,
by focusing on three main topics of environmental governance in the
Information Age.
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