Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 144

to environmental e-governance (cf. Zavestoski and Shulman, 2002 )or
e 2 -governance. 15
Perhaps one of the more extensive and interesting explorative inves-
tigations into the potentials and innovations of e-governance for envi-
ronmental policy is done by the eRulemaking Research Group in the
United States (cf. Shulman, 2004 ). 16 In a number of workshops with
policy makers and stakeholders in policy-making processes, the influ-
ence of the Internet on environmental rule making was assessed. From
these workshops, it proved that there is still little agreement and large
uncertainty about how policy- and decision-making procedures and
outcomes will change following the growing development of electronic
governance. The claims of expanded public access and growing influ-
ence of civil society and citizens have not really been fulfilled yet. Lack
of harmonisation and centralisation among governmental agencies in
e-governance, user-unfriendly systems and inequalities because signifi-
cant groups have difficulties in accessing Internet and commenting elec-
tronically are among some of the downsides of e 2 -governance witnessed
by citizens. By the same token, environmental policy makers and rule-
makers are confronted with questions of usability of large quantities
and poor qualities of electronic submissions and have to learn how to
deal with such comments; NGOs face the inflation of numerous dupli-
cations of similar comments submitted to rule makers, especially in
those situations in which electronic commenting is also facilitated by
environmental NGOs to increase membership. 17 Consequently, much
governmental effort is recently put into procedures and technologies to
organise and summarise the contents of large public comment
databases, experiences also witnessed in other European countries.

U.S. citizens from benefits and democratic processes they are legally entitled to.
See more general analyses of (cyber)democratic governance in the Information
Age in Kamarck and Nye ( 1999 ).

15

Note that much of the explorations in this section and chapter refer to
e-government rather than to e-governance. Thus, discussions here will not
include questions of the governance of cyberspace information at large (for
that, see Kobrin, 2001 ).

16

This research group consists of scholars from various disciplines and a number
of different U.S. universities. It developed out of a workshop held at the
Kennedy School of Government in 2003. See also their project Web site
http://erulemking.ucsur.pitt.edu/.

17

Shulman ( 2004 ) reports on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notices on
mercury emissions, which resulted in 680,000 e-mailed public comments. After
a labour-intensive manual sorting, there proved to be forty-two hundred
distinctive comments.