Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 10

Consequently, information and knowledge became inherently con-
tested and could/should be deconstructed, contributing to and empha-
sising the disputable contribution of scientific information to environ-
mental reform. In their detailed, sophisticated and innovative analyses
on the changing role of knowledge and information in dealing with
environmental challenges, scholars in this tradition were rather one-
sided in neglecting to a large extent the formative role of information
and knowledge in environmental governance and reform (so central in
the first two traditions). In addition, their alternative was not so much
less information and less knowledge, but a better understanding of the
limitations of scientific knowledge (especially versus lay knowledge)
and more insights in the politics and power of knowledge generation
and dissemination.
Although all three traditions are far from outdated and continue to
produce rich and valuable insights, they miss - each in their own way -
the overall perspective, tools and focus to understand and interpret how
the contemporary information explosion and information revolution
are transforming the way modern societies (try to) cope with their
environmental challenges. Because their origins and backgrounds are
in the 1970s and 1980s, this is not too surprising. A starting point
for a more overarching perspective needs to be founded on ideas and
perspectives of the Information Society and the Information Age (but
cannot remain limited to those for their failure to take the environment
into account, as we will argue next).

4. The Information Society and the missing environment

Ideas on the growing role of information in the construction and trans-
formation of modern society date back to the late 1960s and 1970s
when a first group of authors started to reflect on what was then com-
monly referred to as the postindustrial society or the Information Soci-
ety. 5 “The post-industrial society is an information society, as industrial
society is a goods-producing society” (Bell, 1973 :467). Although ini-
tially the basic idea of the postindustrial society was the movement
to a service society and information itself remained relatively undevel-
oped, in the 1970s information moved to a more central position: “My

5

The notion of Information Society emerged for the first time more
systematically in Japan in the late 1960s. Among Japanese scholars a major
interest has remained in the idea of the Information Society (Kumar, 1995 ).