Information-poor environments: Asian tigers - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 270

communication and information and those who have no access is large.
The digital divide in China and Vietnam runs along economic and
geographical lines. The eastern and southeastern areas in China (Kat-
suno, 2005 ) and the key economic zones around HoChiMinh City
and HaNoi in Vietnam have the largest share of Internet connections,
whereas - notwithstanding governmental policies and international
development funding and projects - rural areas have much less access.
5. Conclusion: informational governance in status nascendi
It becomes clear that informational governance in China and Vietnam
is at best in development, and far from matured. Although in China
several sprouts of informational governance could be identified, Viet-
nam largely fails the institutional conditions for such a development
at the moment: limitations on the development of an independent civil
society, media and public space; an economic sector whose interests
are still strongly intertwined with the state sector; a small part of soci-
ety connected to the World Wide Web; and a poor state capacity in
information collection, handling and dissemination make the condi-
tions for informational governance in Vietnam meagre. Although the
institutional conditions for informational governance in China look
much more favourable, compared to the OECD countries in the Euro-
pean and North American continents China's information and media-
scape is underdeveloped for informational governance. A significant
part of informational pressure in the field of environment originates
then from outside, from the global economy and international assis-
tance programs that play an increasing role in Vietnam (and less from
global civil society representatives that find a hard time invading the
country). But then, of course, most informational governance practices
that can be witnessed are not equally spread over the country. We find
them in the economic hubs or the sites that receive strong international
support and interventions, and less in the rural periphery and small
towns.
Again, as stated in the introduction to this chapter, China and Viet-
nam cannot be taken as representative for the developing world. They
are much too specific for that. But this chapter has helped us to under-
stand the relevance of informational governance outside the core nodes
that make up the global network society. Many of the dynamics that
speed up new modes of environmental governance in OECD countries