Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 154

regularly articulated and emphasised as an alternative to (conventional)
state regulation, in the form of neoliberal, deregulatory programs.
Although this does happen, I do not think this is a specific threat to
informational governance, but, rather, a relatively independent devel-
opment that all environmental programs and strategies potentially face.
Informational governance or regulation should not be put on an
equal footing, or in direct causality, with voluntary measures or
deregulation, so strongly welcomed by conservative business agen-
das. Although several informational innovations have been brought
forward with the idea of regulatory retrenchment, and some hope
that informational governance comes in place of compulsory legisla-
tive requirements, reality is different. The DQA example, for instance,
shows the desperate need felt by business to further regulate infor-
mational governance in order to remove the environmental teeth of
informational governance. Required transparency and mandatory dis-
closure do not just simply result in regulatory relief, nor do they just
add to the regulatory 'burden' in environmental politics. Informational
governance cannot be put into a simple one-dimensional regulation-
deregulation scheme. As Mary Graham ( 2002 ) has powerfully
illustrated, informational governance and mandatory disclosure are
constantly threatened with arguments on protecting trade secrets, min-
imising regulatory burdens for companies, and guarding national secu-
rity, especially after 9/11. Sometimes this results in calls for further reg-
ulation of informational governance measures, sometimes in calls for
deregulation. Thus, although informational regulation is sometimes
supported with arguments for further deregulation, I do not think
that the two are very tightly linked, which discharges me from specif-
ically entering into the potential threats of informational governance
for deregulatory and neoliberal environmental politics.
In addition to this danger of deregulatory programs, I will discuss
two other environmental reform threats of informational governance:
symbolic governance and information closure.
Symbolic governance
The first references to symbolic politics date back from the 1960s
(e.g., Edelman, 1964 ) and, since then, the idea of symbolic politics has
received constant attention. In most of these studies, symbolic politics
are interpreted in a rather problematic way, referring to politics or