Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 238

among state, market and civil society. A strong undemocratic state,
a weak environmental movement and a transitional economy are far
from representative in the non-OECD countries.
Nevertheless, focusing on China and Vietnam will serve our pur-
pose if we leave the idea of representativeness and at the same time
go beyond a focus on only nation-state institutions and arrangements
in analysing informational governance of the environment. China and
Vietnam enable us then to see how some of the dynamics of infor-
mational governance are specific for a particular set of non-OECD
countries, whereas other dynamics also penetrate through global net-
works and flows in non-OECD regions. Or to put it in Appendurai's
vocabulary: it provides us with an idea where the various scapes that
allow and 'govern' informational governance in China and Vietnam
differ from Western OECD scapes. As such, this chapter gives us a
taste of how global and homogeneous (or rather: heterogeneous) at
this moment informational governance is.
2. State monitoring: monopoly, reliability and capacity
China and Vietnam are at the crossroad of two major processes: a
transitional process (from a centrally planned to a market economy,
with still limited democratic liberties) and a developmental process
(from a developing to a developed country). Informational processes
and governance in these countries bear the characteristics of both pro-
cesses. The developmental process in China and Vietnam shares with
other developing countries limitations and specificities with respect
to informational infrastructures and capacities, access to information
networks and flows, and their involvement in more global economic
processes, networks and flows. The transitional process, in contrast,
brings a number of differences with other developing economies. First,
the close alliance of state-owned components of the economy with parts
of the state bureaucracy still make stringent environmental monitoring,
control and enforcement a complicated matter. Often environmental
authorities could not and cannot operate independently in enforcing
environmental laws and regulations; they need to negotiate and discuss
interventions with the more powerful parts of the bureaucracy. The
growing separation of state and market to some extent changes this
(cf. Lo and Tang, 2006 ). Second, reliable information has always