Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 5

Box 1.1 Clarification on terminology
Throughout this topic, I will use the concept of information as the
overall category, rather than data or knowledge. During the various
conferences in which ideas on this topic have been presented, sev-
eral scholars have questioned information as the central concept,
often preferring knowledge as the key category. There are several
reasons not to do so. This work is especially in line with debates
on the Information Society and the Information Age, and less in the
tradition of constructivism, the sociology of science, expert knowl-
edge versus lay knowledge and so on. Although the concept of
Knowledge Society is becoming slowly common (e.g., Stehr, 1994 ;
UNESCO, 2005 ), Information Society and Information Age are
more widely used in these debates. Second, knowledge refers to pro-
cesses, problems and struggles on interpretation (through science
or other frames) of information. Although that is definitely rele-
vant and will emerge throughout the topic, this is too limited for
understanding information-related changes in environmental gov-
ernance. Equally relevant for our analysis are the digitalisation of
information, the information and communication technologies, the
time-space compression in information circulation and flows, and
so on, which are all referring to information rather than to knowl-
edge. In that sense, I interpret information as a somewhat more
general category than knowledge. As for the distinction between
information and data: Jimenez-Beltran ( 1995 ), executive director
of the European Environmental Agency (EEA) at that time, makes
a distinction between environmental data, which refers to - often
quantified - numbers and figures on environmental conditions, and
environmental information, which points to meaningful flows of
signs for a targeted audience. Usually information refers to raw
data that are processed, selected and translated to address mean-
ingfully an audience. The key problem that Europe faces in today's
Information Society, according to Jimenez-Beltran, is the contradic-
tion between data abundance and information scarcity. Esty ( 2004 )
makes a similar distinction: 'Data is the raw material. Information
is the intermediate good, reflecting some processing of the data.
Knowledge is the final product where analysis allows us to extract
conclusions'. I will not follow this distinction strictly, but will use
information as a common overall denominator.