Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 145

At the same time, structured input forms, rebuttal comments (and
eventually online dialogue), open modelling to assist in understanding
technical information and other innovations are suggested to facilitate
and further participation in e-governance.
As Tumber ( 2001 ) rightly remarks, electronic governance also can
have major consequences for the role of the conventional - up until now
powerful - media and forms of mediation in governance. It changes or
even replaces the government-media-public system and makes govern-
ments and other agencies and organisations, such as NGOs and other
private actors, less dependent on the media. Even such powerful media
as television are challenged by the Internet, through which information
production and transmission is democratised. In Chapter 9 ,Ifurther
explore how the media is involved in environmental governance and
how its role and position changes under conditions of the information
revolution.
Overall, the potential change that e-governance brings to regulating
the environment can be large. But whether that really materialises and
what the actual nature of this change is remains uncertain. Increased
transparency, participation, accountability and better decisions can be
outcomes, as well as procedural (rather than substantive) legitimation,
information overkill (both for citizens and for governing agencies con-
fronted with comments), further inequalities in influencing rule mak-
ing through a digital divide, growing litigation and the undermining of
traditional forms of participation without providing an adequate digi-
talised substitute (cf. Schlosberg and Dryzek, 2002 ;Wong and Welch,
2004 ). But digital environmental policy making and rule making also
might basically digitalise the existing paper-based policy-making pro-
cess, copying the strength and weaknesses of existing - nondigitalised -
policy processes, as Shulman ( 2004 ) seems to conclude: “The Inter-
net Still Might (but Probably Won't) Change Everything.” This will be
especially the case when the rationale for e-government remains in cost-
savings and other familiar efficiency matters (or what Chadwick and
May [ 2003 ] label the managerial model of e-government), rather than
focusing on the potential gains towards more participatory democracy
and higher levels of trust, transparency and legitimacy.
4. The search for information quality
What the developments in informational governance and e 2 -gover-
nance point at is the increasing role of information, informational