Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 141

and ICT the ability and capacity increased to spot and visualise envi-
ronmental problems, assess their scope and seriousness, understand
their effects and manage the information flows, all essential for identi-
fying and designing better response strategies. But, according to Esty,
perhaps the largest contribution to environmental governance comes
from transparency, where information and data become widely avail-
able and disclose the laggards and polluters. This is valid within nation-
states, as well as across countries.
The Environmental Sustainability Index, more recently relabelled as
the Environmental Performance Index, 11 is a key example of what Esty
means when he refers to the power of data in driving environmental
reform. This index ranks countries in terms of their environmental per-
formance on a large number of environmental indicators. As one of the
founders and main contributors to this ESI, Esty ( 2004 ) illustrates how
states are motivated by these disclosures by the example of the outrage
of the government of Belgium when it found itself listed initially in
position number seventy-nine. With this EPI program, environmental
data collection, processing and disclosure is aggregated at the level of
countries, whereas in the former disclosure programmes, it was usu-
ally at the level of firms (or municipalities; see Chapter 10 ). Taipale
( 2003 ) joins Esty in his analysis, by stressing that information technol-
ogy has become an agent of change in recent state environmental policy
making, moving environmental policy making away from its dominant
command-and-control outlook towards more innovative market- and
information-driven modes of governance.
Compared to the earlier notions of right-to-know, information dis-
closure and informational regulation, notions of data-driven policy
making are much more technology driven and enabled. It is the
new information technologies that enable and drive new modes of
environmental governance, and not so much the activities of NGOs
and civil society. Data-driven regulation is thus much more strongly
connected to digitalisation, enhanced possibility of data processing

11

This index has been developed by the Columbia University Centre for
International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), the Yale Center of
Environmental Law and Policy, Yale University, and the World Economic
Forum's Global Leaders for Tomorrow Environment Task Force. See
http://www.ciesin.columbia.edu/indicators/ESI. The Environmental
Sustainability (or Performance) Index (ESI/ EPI) is a measure of overall progress
towards environmental sustainability, developed for 133 countries. The ESI
scores are based on a set of twenty-two core “indicators,” each of which
combines two to six variables for a total of sixty-seven underlying variables.