Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 186

labelling and certifications. Although in most countries there exists
one official, often state-recognised, ecolabel, there is at the same time
a diversity of labels, visualisations, product-information suggestions,
logos, symbols and colouring of product packaging that aims to com-
municate a message of environmental friendliness. Sometimes, these are
backed by private interest governance (Jacek, 1991 ) standards, some-
times these are controlled by independent institutions, and sometimes
these are individual initiatives of one or a group of companies. The
reliability issues that come along with some of these may undermine
trust in the entire labelling and certification systems, and thus limit the
informational power in these symbolic tokens.
This all is further complicated with the significant uncertainties that
come along with environmental knowledge and information (cf. Chap-
ter 3 ). Life cycle analysis, modelling, risk assessments and other natural
science tools all aim to rationalise, objectify and aggregate environ-
mental information related to products and production. But the natu-
ral sciences and their tools have not been able to fundamentally take
away problems of perceived uncertainties with respect to, for instance,
climate change, GMOs, mad cow disease, or toxic substances in plas-
tics and food. These uncertainties work two ways in private infor-
mational governance. In some cases, uncertainties may hamper and
disable public governance by law, increasing the (temporary) emphasis
on (especially private) informational governance (such as, for instance,
in the European case of GMO labelling). Equally often, the absence of
100 percent certainty is used strategically to further distort and frus-
trate environmental governance through what we might label informa-
tional nongovernance, for instance, in green backlash campaigns in the
United States (cf. McCright and Dunlap, 2000 ; 2003 ). In both cases,
conflicts of interest and ideas are increasingly fought on the battle-
ground of environmental information, especially because the inherent
uncertainties seem to allow fierce and enduring battles without any
authoritative judge.
Fifth, and finally, environmental information and communication in
economic systems are also characterised - or, sometimes, dominated -
by advertisements, marketing and public relations. With the growing -
also economic - importance of environmental and health issues,
advertisements, marketing and public relations increasingly include
environmental references. With that environment becomes a market-
ing tool, strategically used in large-scale and forceful advertisement