Greening the networked economy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 187

campaigns and company symbols. Systems of tracking and tracing,
corporate environmental reporting and life cycle analyses then become
blurred with multimedia advertisements, whereas entirely different
rationalities, logics and forms dominate. Although this boosts the infor-
mational economy, it might seriously jeopardise private informational
governance of the environment. The question then becomes if systems
are in place to discriminate these strategic advertisements from truly
informational governance on the environment. Notwithstanding the
developments in internal codes of conducts, social corporate respon-
sibility and the like, such 'revealing' and discriminatory systems have
often to be found outside the economic networks and chains.
6. Conclusion: stateless governance through information?
In the global networked economy, environmental and sustainability
issues can no longer be ignored by private firms. They have become
part and parcel of their business environment, whether it is in the form
of new (private and public) regulations with which they have to cope,
new market opportunities and competition areas or new challenges
put forward to them by (organised) citizen-consumers. In general, pri-
vate actors have understood these new conditions quite well, and new
governance theories have reflected on the growing involvement of pri-
vate actors in environmental governance. This chapter has analysed to
what extent and how information has become increasingly important
in environmental business strategies and activities. Within companies,
between companies, between companies and consumers and in state-
market interactions information has become a key resource in dealing
with environmental challenges and pressures. And information politics
has become a key domain in which environmental controversies are at
play. Although we should acknowledge and be aware of the growing
importance of information politics in environmental controversies that
involve private producers, we should not be too naive regarding the
final contribution of such private informational strategies and activities
to sustainability.
In reviewing the emerging tendency of stateless regulation of transna-
tional economic networks through the monitoring of transnational
companies by consumers and companies themselves, Seidman ( 2005 )
is quite straightforward. The monitoring and informational activities
of civil society and consumer NGOs, on the one hand, and corporate