Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 137

Four main factors seem to determine the national performance on
public access to environmental information in a country. First, the gov-
ernment capacity in staff, equipment, procedures, training and the like
is a major factor in actual public access to environmental information.
Sub-Saharan Africa gives evidence of poor state capacities, compared
with, for instance, China and - to a lesser extent - Vietnam (cf. Chap-
ter 10 ). Second, an active and capable civil society with strong NGOs
contributes to effective use and good performance of public access.
Countries such as China and Vietnam are clear cases with still weak
civil societies, which to some extent reflect on the access to environ-
mental information. Third, the position of the media, media attention
and coverage of environment, and public scrutiny prove to be major
factors in improving public access. And, finally, the international com-
munity, via provisions and requirements in multilateral environmental
agreements and conventions, via official development assistance, via
the operations of multilateral institutions and via international organ-
isations, forms an important factor in assisting especially developing
and industrialising countries to create information systems, provide
staff training, publish state of the environment reports and support all
kind of other conditions that facilitate public access to information.
A special case is the European Union, where the accession process of
ten new members from Central and Eastern Europe formed a major
trigger for upward harmonisation in access to information.
Regulation by information
Initially, the right-to-know and mandatory disclosure legislation and
ideas were not related to any ideas of creating incentives or new dynam-
ics of environmental improvements and reform. The basic idea was
simply related to ideas of democracy and transparency: citizens have
a democratic right to access information and for that information
to be disclosed publicly. It was only in the mid-1990s that informa-
tion disclosure, right-to-know, and environmental reporting obliga-
tions were interpreted as having positive environmental governance
effects. In the more legal and economic American and international
literature, the influence of the wider availability of environmental
information on environmental policy-making and regulatory processes
have been brought together under the notion of informational regula-
tion (e.g., Konar and Cohen, 1997 ;Tietenberg, 1998 ; Kleindorfer and
Orts, 1999 ; Case, 2001 ; Dasgupta and Wheeler, 1996 ; Graham, 2002 ).