Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 3

information systems, but also in new time-space connections between
producers and consumers; new governance arrangements between pri-
vate and public actors; the emergence of auditing, inspection and ver-
ification agencies and new questions of accountability, transparency
and trust. But do these new institutional arrangements form an ade-
quate answer to the uncertainties, risks and consumer anxiety that
seem to have become part of the globalised food system? Are these
informational arrangements better able to deal with those ques-
tions and doubt than the conventional scientific and nation-state
institutions?
These two examples seem to mark a new era in the role of informa-
tion and informational processes in governing the environment. It is
not just the (supranational or global) scale of information collection,
handling, spreading and use that point to these innovations, but also
the sheer amount of information, the speed of information processing,
the availability of information for ever-wider groups in society and the
growing importance (or power) of information resources in environ-
mental struggles that contribute to that. But do such innovations in
environmental knowledge and information collection and handling
really mark a new way of how modern society approaches its environ-
mental challenges? Are the Envisat and the tracking and tracing system
not just one further small step in an ongoing development of collecting
information for governing the environment, a development that started
at the birth of modern environmental policy in the 1960s and will be
continuously refined incrementally? This chapter sets the argument
that we have to rethink the role of information in environmental gov-
ernance - that our present world witnesses a qualitatively new phase in
the relation between information processing and environmental gover-
nance. That new phase is partly - but not primarily - a product of new
technological advancements that enlarge our informational capabili-
ties. 2 But it is, moreover, marked by a number of wider developments

2

There have been earlier revolutionary developments in information and
communication technologies (such as telegraph and the telephone system in the
nineteenth and early twentieth century), which had a major impact on modern
society's economic and social life. These also affected the 'old' social
movements, in terms of increased speed and range of communication
(cf. Tarrow, 1998 ). But these earlier communication innovations have been
hardly relevant for changes in environmental governance, as around those days
environmental protection was hardly developed and articulated in a full-fledged
relative autonomous subsystem in modern society, with its own rationalities,
institutions and organisations.