Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 160

governance. With informational governance, the environmental state
becomes engaged in new modes and dynamics of governance, with
different resources, debates and politics. These informational changes
partly parallel the wider discourse on shifts in governance, as reflected
on in Chapters 1 and 3 : more flexibility, more actors on stage (as we
will see in Chapter 7 and 8 ), less hierarchical, a more dispersed locus
of authority. But with informational governance the digitalisation, the
centrality of informational quality, the importance of trust and trans-
parency, and the politics and struggles on information move to the
fore. In that sense, the notion of informational governance add to our
insights on the locus of debates, struggles and politics that the environ-
mental state is involved in nowadays.
Among all these innovations, we should be careful not to lose sight of
the continuities in the role of the (environmental) state in governance.
Governance innovations in mandatory disclosures and e-governance
clearly illustrate the close relationship between conventional regula-
tion and informational governance. In most examples and practices of
informational governance, government and state authorities play still
a major role, for instance, as the authority that requires the collec-
tion and disclosure of information or the organisation that mediates in
or helps closing informational controversies. Also, in another sense, it
is business as usual in informational governance: sometimes informa-
tional governance is supported by the powers that be as it is in their
(e.g., deregulatory) interest; sometimes it is condemned by these very
same powers and met with calls for further regulation of informational
governance or complete deregulation. Following these controversies
and conflicting interests on informational governance, disclosure is
never full disclosure: some sources, some substances, some risks, and
some societal activities, products and services fall outside disclosure
and informational programs. In conclusion, there is significant conti-
nuity from conventional policy making into innovative informational
governance.
As with conventional environmental policy making, the organisation
and design of informational governance is thought to be crucial for its
success. Access to Internet, understandability for a wide audience, trust
in the medium and the messenger and interest within the wider public
or their representative organisations are mentioned as relevant factors
that make or break successful informational governance. But what
is and how can we judge successfulness of informational governance