Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 7

science (and natural scientists) was for a long time seen as a land-
mark to assess and distinguish true from false information, public rela-
tions from disinterested dissemination, balanced judgements from self-
interested biases and apocalyptic predictions from comforting naivety.
Although we will see that such an 'arbiter view' of science is no longer
adequate today, it did help the rapid and further institutionalisation
of environmental sciences and studies in academia, until it gained a
comfortable established position by the end of the 1980s. Environmen-
tal institutes, university departments, course and education programs,
academic journals and topic series are the institutionalised witnesses. It
does not seem that we are about to reach the finish of the rising natural
science production of environmental information and knowledge.
But although the amount of available environmental knowledge and
information is growing on almost all environmental issues for all kinds
of decision makers (private and public, institutional and individual)
through increasing scientific research, monitoring practices, informa-
tion storage capacity and high-speed and long-distance information
transport, reflections and interpretations on what these developments
in environmental information mean for the way modern society han-
dles the environment have been rather poor. After summarising how
the environmental social sciences have conventionally studied envi-
ronmental information (Section 3 ), I will set the stage for this topic -
and introduce its various chapters and themes - by arguing that a new
Information Society/Information Age perspective needs to be developed
to understand how contemporary society develops new informational
modes in dealing with environmental challenges.
3. Conventional interpretations of environmental information
Historically, three social science research traditions have explicitly
focused on interpreting environmental information and knowledge
processes with respect to issues of environmental governance: a more
conventional tradition following attitude-behaviour models; a more
policy/economics/legal tradition focusing on information gaps, distor-
tion and transaction costs and a more critical one based on construc-
tivism and the Risk Society thesis.
The first two traditions - established in the late 1960s and 1970s,
but still applied today - focus on environmental science, knowledge
and information in dealing with environmental crisis in a rather
straightforward - we would now say: simple modernity - way. The