Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 177

internal, secret and out of reach of private suppliers and customers/
consumers, public authorities and civil society. And there are also vari-
ous legal barriers that restrict free-floating and flowing of information
within commodity networks and chains. 19
With the emergence of ICT, information systems in commodity
chains and networks have been partly digitalised, both when infor-
mation is applied for internal governance of commodity chains and
networks (or private market transparency) and when information is
related to external or public market transparency and trust. With that
digitalisation, the possibilities of (private) informational governance
are expanding. ICT greatly facilitates chain coordination effort and
the exchange of information upstream and downstream. But it is also
directly linked to monitoring and tracking products through their com-
modity chain at real time. To a significant extent, this digitalisation of
chain information systems is related to logistics, product qualifications,
just-in-time delivery, better chain coordination and so on, and less so to
environmental and safety issues (see, for instance, the strong ICT-based
information systems being developed in the health care chain). But, as
argued earlier, following convention theory, increasingly environmen-
tal and product safety requirements are being exchanged in commodity
chains, and ICT plays a growing role in that, too. There is an expan-
sion of Web sites with product information and product comparison
on environmental and product safety dimensions, an experimenting
with webcams revealing production circumstances, 20 and a growing

digitalisation of tracing and tracking systems.
Also in their encounters with critical citizen-consumers and envi-
ronmental and consumer organisations, producers increasingly turn
to the Internet. When NGOs have built informative and widely visited
Web sites on companies with poor environmental, labour and/or social
performances, companies are copying this strategy. Interactions with
consumers and debates with critical NGOs take increasingly place via

19

Some of these restrictions include intellectual property rights, privacy rights,
liability concerns around making information available and competition laws
regulating information exchange agreements (see Nouwt et al., 2004 ).

20

See, for instance, Peter's Farm (http://www.petersfarm.com), an initiative taken
by the Dutch calf feed provider Alpuro. Consumers of calf meat obtain a code
that enables them to enter a Web site with webcam images of stables from
which their calf meat originates. Similar initiatives with revealing Web sites,
although not often with webcams, are found for other products.