Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
environmental qualities but at the same time emphasise and articulate
the essence and importance of environmental rationalities. And as such
they govern actions: of consumers, industries, utility providers, citi-
zens, local governments and so on. This raises a whole set of questions
(on verification, symbol management, marketing of symbols, competi-
tion between symbols, actual behavioural changes, etc.), which we will
address later in this topic.
Of course, that is not to say that conventional symbolic politics no
longer exist: governments, polluters and organisations try to mislead
the public by avoiding serious environmental reform through symbolic
actions. The Information Age literature shows us that there is a major
chance that such symbolic actions may return as a boomerang on the
source; either through demystifying these nonmeasures through trans-
parency and public scrutiny or through self-fulfilling prophecy, when
various actors start behaving in line with these symbolic measures,
being afraid of damaging their reputational or legitimatory capital if
they ignore them.
Information closure? Environmental governance
and homeland security (post-9/11)
The growing importance of information in environmental governance
makes environmental governance also vulnerable to information clo-
sure tendencies. Although from the 1960s onwards we have witnessed
an overall tendency of further information disclosure, this is by no
means a law written in stone, or an unfolding evolutionary process.
The most challenging recent case is perhaps the aftermath of 9/11.
The terrorist attacks in New York (2001), Madrid (2004) and Lon-
don (2005), among others, undoubtedly have had an impact on the
debates on information disclosure. Immediately after 9/11, under sig-
nificant time pressure and without sophisticated analyses, U.S. EPA
officials made decisions on restricting access to sensitive information
(cf. Graham, 2002 : 6). The first response of EPA after 9/11 was to
remove the Risk Management Plans from the EPA Web site, the most
controversial section being the Offsite Consequence Analysis. In the
aftermath of 9/11, a discussion evolved about the merits and dangers of
providing potentially sensitive information on environmental risks to
the general public. On the one hand, environmental interest groups and
advocates of disclosure, such as the U.S.-based OMB Watch, stressed
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