Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 185

But equally important are nonregulatory developments that push
increased transparency and access of environmentally relevant infor-
mation for all stakeholders (e.g., the importance of trust, reputational
capital and corporate social responsibility). The right-to-know and dis-
closure legislation, which were and are crucial in opening the public
domain on information, should be parallelled by similar - legal or
nonlegal - initiatives in the private domain.
Second, and related, informational governance within the economic
domain is restricted as a result of the limitations on transparency that
are set by legal regimes, competition law and privacy rules. Within
capitalist market economies and democracies that cherish individual
rights of privacy, policy and legal systems usually limit the collection
and dissemination of environmentally relevant information. Informa-
tion sharing between competitors may run against policies of compe-
tition authorities. Equally, information collection on consumers and
customers might be obstructed by privacy regulation. Information col-
lection and use of citizen-consumers on energy use, mobility behaviour,
shopping and water consumption may be essential for informational
governance in commodity chains and networks, but often are believed
to run against the privacy regulations of individuals. This puts - again
(see Chapter 5 )-the question of surveillance on the table.
Third, and closely related to questions of access, are problems on
reliability of information. A major share of information is still pro-
duced by, in the hands of, or controlled by a few dominant players
in the economic networks and chains. Those players do not always
have an incentive towards complete and reliable information (disclo-
sure). Auditing, verification and control, and certification of informa-
tion become then essential. But audits, verifications and certifications
are complicated, time-consuming and often depend on cooperation
with those in charge of information. And since the 2002 scandal of
Enron and Arthur Andersen, 32 we also have to worry about who is
controlling the controllers and how reliable is that. The possibilities of
generating incomplete, incorrect, irrelevant or misleading information
are far from negligible and can thus seriously endanger private infor-
mational governance, for instance, around the proliferation of green

32

Since the start of the new millennium, KPMG, Deloitte & Touche, Ernst &
Young and PriceWaterhouseCoopers also have been involved in various
accounting scandals, similar to the Enron/Andersen case.