Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 139

the Rio Principle 10 and the Access Initiative, 8 OECD countries
have sped up regulation on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers
(cf. Sand, 2002 ; Graham and Miller, 2005 ). Strongly supported by
ICT developments, this has resulted in direct access to standardised,
site-specific, up-to-date and user-friendly environmental emission
and performance data of thousands of companies, among others, in
the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Japan, Norway,
the Netherlands and other countries in the EU. 9 Not only do these sites
allow citizens to search their neighbourhood for polluting sources,
to compare these facilities and neighbourhoods with others and to
pressure companies for improvement, but they also moved journalists,
polluters themselves, governmental authorities, political representa-
tives, shareholders and others into environmental action, leading to
environmental improvements. Fung and O'Rourke ( 2000 ) explain
how the TRI mandatory disclosure program in the United States has
triggered various social dynamics by different actors, all towards more
environmental pressure being put on polluters and environmental
state authorities: direct action by communities, pressures on regula-
tory agencies for enforcement, mass media attention, stock market
reactions, new legislative initiatives by states in the United States and
preemptive company actions. By 1998, the TRI mandatory disclosure
program was credited with a 46 percent reduction in emissions of the
listed chemicals over ten years (cf. Fung and O'Rourke, 2000 ; Graham
and Miller, 2005 ). 10 Chapter 7 also will discuss how similar dynamics

parties had signed the Protocol, but none of them have yet ratified it. By the
end of 2004, it had not yet entered into force.

8

See the Web site http://www.pp10.org. In Chapter 8 ,wewill further elaborate
on the right-to-know and information access developments in the field of
environmental governance, as these are especially meant to further involve
citizens and civil society in environmental governance through information.

9

See http://www.scorecard.org, launched by the Environmental Defense Fund in
1998; http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk, the U.K. government successor
Web site of Friend of the Earth Factory Watch program, launched in the late
1990s; http://www.eper.cec.eu.int, launched in February 2004 by the European
Union. Petkova et al. ( 2002 ) also provides data on countries that are taking
steps towards pollutant release and transfer registers, which include Mexico
and Slovakia.

10

Of course, the data after 1998 is more complicated. The reductions in releases
were particularly strong in the early years, it mostly happened via recycling
rather than prevention, emissions of carcinogens decreased more than average,
and the distribution varied greatly among industrial sectors, media (air, water,
and land), and states (see Graham and Miller, 2005 , for details). Note that this