Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 159

conventional ideas of one-dimensional security along lines of military
and terrorist endangerments, to multidimensional definitions of secu-
rity that include notions of environmental and ecological threats and
risk, the opposition against information disclosure by using (national)
security arguments is put in a different light (cf. Barnett, 2001 ; Pirages
and Cousins, 2005 ). 28

The informational state?

Ideas of regressive information politics are further developed and gen-
eralised by Sandra Braman ( 2006 ) into the thesis of a change of state:
the (bureaucratic) welfare state of the twentieth century is replaced
by the informational state in the new millennium. And - according to
the author - this is not a trend to be welcomed or celebrated. This
informational state uses information policy to exercise power, at the
detriment of - among others - democracy, free access to information,
information rights, evidenced-based policy making, and participation
of citizen-consumers (Braman, 314ff.). In a lengthy and powerful anal-
ysis, Braman argues that the growing dominance of information in poli-
cies and politics and the way information is captured and monopolised
by especially the state (and capital) leads at least in the United States to
a surveillance state that threatens individual rights of citizens. In that
sense, her thesis is in line with the critics of the Information Society
such as Schiller and Lyon (cf. Chapter 2 ) and falls short because of
a similar massive determinism by hardly allowing any tendencies of
countersurveillance, transparency or civil society empowerments.

7. Conclusion: continuities and discontinuities

This chapter has illustrated and debated the information-informed
innovations in the role of the state in contemporary environmental

28

In April 2007, the Security Council of the United Nations discussed
environmental security, endangered by climate change, for the first time.
Despite opposition from the United States, Russia and China, which made
clear that they did not see climate change as an appropriate subject for the
security council, the United Kingdom pushed for this subject and in the end did
not meet any veto. But the absence of most of the five permanent and ten
rotating members was telling. At the same time, eleven former generals of the
U.S. military issued a sixty-three-page report calling on the Bush
administration to do more to counter climate change, warning that otherwise
there could be “significant national security challenges” to the United States.