Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 191

briefings, leakages and high-profile press conference; and mediagenic
and visually attractive and spectacular campaigns. Their early focus on
information and informational resources also was caused by their lim-
ited access to and control over economic and authoritative resources.
Gamson (1995) even claims that environmentalists are media junkies,
being so strongly oriented to, and measuring the effects of their (won)
campaigns by, media coverage. In all, environmental NGOs have been
better and especially much earlier aware of the importance of repu-
tation, legitimacy, media coverage, trust and the use of symbols than
the later actors in informational governance: state agencies, the private
sector and the 'old' social movement actors. The 1995 battle between
Greenpeace and Shell on the planned - but finally prevented - dumping
of the oil platform Brent Spar in the Atlantic Ocean was not a battle
fought in the Atlantic but a media and information battle. It illus-
trates the advanced informational politics of Greenpeace compared to
a multinational corporation - and the U.K. government - that relied
and focused too much on conventional power struggles. In that sense,
there is an almost natural alliance between environmental activists and
NGOs, on the one side, and informational governance, on the other.
There is no need to repeat the analyses on the ways in which envi-
ronmental NGOs innovatively dealt with and applied information and
informational resources during the heydays of conventional environ-
mental governance (see Box 8.1 for an example). Others in the tradition
of new social movement research have done so in much detail. In this
chapter, I will focus especially on how and to what extent the natural
alliance between the environmental movement and informational gov-
ernance is changing under conditions of globalisation and ICT. With
the growing importance of information and communication technol-
ogy, significant changes in the information politics and practices of
environmentalists and the global reach of environmentalism and the
more advanced informational politics of states and the private sector
can be witnessed on three fronts: (i) internal organisation, commu-
nication and structure; (ii) strategies, campaigning and coalition and
(iii) the enhanced geographical scale and outreach. These three domains
of innovations in civil society's informational governance will emerge
from our analysis in this chapter, and we will conclude with an analysis
of the dangers and vulnerabilities of high-profile informational politics
for environmental activism.