Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 235

coined the dissimilarities in ICT and Internet access around the globe
from the early 1990s onwards. And still the figures are telling: large
parts of developing countries, and especially those in sub-Saharan
Africa, are largely disconnected from the World Wide Web. The digital
divide points our attention to only one specific dimension of informa-
tional governance (digitalised information related to ICT and Internet).
Although related to the Internet and ICT, informational governance on
the environment should not be limited to digitalised information flows.
It also has to do with nondigitalised monitoring and information collec-
tion programs, with transparency and disclosure of information, with
monopolising information, with informational controversies. Exactly
for that reason, Chapter 1 identified four dimensions of information-
poor-environments: economic, political, institutional and cultural. In
developing countries, we often will find mixtures of economic, political,
cultural and/or institutional causes of information-poor environments.
More recent analyses of the informational highway and the infor-
mation hubs in the global economy have fine-tuned the rough geo-
graphical division in the information-rich OECD and the information-
poor developing countries. The global informational networks and
flows connect and integrate developed parts of the world with specific
key nodes, hubs, places and practices in the lesser developed coun-
tries and regions. Although we can still claim that sub-Saharan Africa
and developing countries in Asia are poorly connected to the World
Wide Web, specific localities and specific practices (productions linked
to transnational commodity chains; members of transnational NGO
networks) in these regions manage to connect well to the informa-
tional highway or even become a hub (e.g., metropolises). And spe-
cific locations, practices and groups in more developed countries are
falling short of information flows, as we have noted in the previous
chapters.
So, although information-poor environments cannot be equalised
with developing countries, it is most likely that (regions, practices
and groups in) such countries will face informational deficits and
show characteristics of informational peripheries. Although some of
the (four) causes behind information-poor environments also can be
found in the geographies and spaces that are closely linked to the global
informational networks and flows, the consequences will be less severe
and extreme. In the empirically informed analysis on informational