Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 153

vis- a-vis, for instance, politicians and business is a relevant factor in the
new power relations in informational governance of the environment.
But trust is not a static concept and needs to be built and (re)gained
continuously, as Greenpeace and Shell witnessed following the Brent
Spar controversy in the mid-1990s.
Procedures also gain trust. In informational governance, especially
when global Internet-based flows of information are at stake, trans-
parency and accountability are key trust-building mechanisms. This
all is not to say that the content of information plays no longer any
role or that all information is of equal value. Conventional criteria of
coherence, consistency, objectivity and verifiability are still crucial first
steps in assessing information quality, and conventional mechanisms as
peer reviews still do their work as the controversies surrounding Lom-
borg's The Skeptical Environmentalist may illustrate. Argumentative
debates and thus discursive democracy remain crucial around contro-
versies and uncertainties, but they will not close the debates. In an era
in which information is overwhelming, multidirectional, never consen-
sual and a key resource in environmental governance, the combination
of information quality with trustworthy actors and transparent and
accountable information-handling processes has become crucial.
Hence, we should not be surprised to witness the large efforts various
state and nonstate organisations put in building and gaining trust and
in developing procedures and strategies for transparency, accountabil-
ity, verification and reputation. And we should not be surprised how
valuable reputations, trustworthy brands and reliable organisations
have become, as compactly brought together under the denominator of
'reputational capital' for producers and 'legimatory capital' for NGOs.
And as reputations are difficult to get but easy to lose, a widening and
shift in the environmental battleground has taken place: from only
formal politics to domains of trust, reputation, legitimacy, reliability,
transparency and information control. Hence, these are the dimensions
of information politics, which have complemented and partly replaced
the conventional dimensions of laws, regulations and enforcement.
6. Regressive information politics?
The growing role and importance of information in environmental gov-
ernance also involves various risks and potential regressions in envi-
ronmental reform. Informational governance ideas and programs are