Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 276

revolution, cannot but affect the way modern societies deal with the
environmental challenges they are confronted with. Or, to formulate it
in one question: what does environmental governance look like in the
Information Age? Environmentalists, environmental authorities and
environmental scholars have not been very reflexive until now on what
the core social transformations of the Information Age mean for their
approach and understanding of environmental governance, although
their actions, activities and investigations do already - marginally or
more fully - echo the changing conditions under which environmental
challenges have to be addressed tomorrow. In that sense, the UNESCO
( 2005 ) report has been exceptional in analysing how the advancement
of sustainable development will be affected and changed as a result of
the emergence of knowledge societies.
I have used the concept informational governance as a common
denominator for the new environmental governance practices and
arrangements, which emerge under conditions of the Information Age.
This final chapter aims to make up the balance and formulate conclu-
sions on informational governance, along several lines. First, I will sum-
marise the core idea of informational governance and indicate the main
advantage of understanding current developments in environmental
governance as informational. Second, I aim to balance informational
governance against conventional forms of environmental governance.
Do we witness something new, how present are these new forms of
governance, and how do they relate both to the conventional forms of
environmental governance that are so strongly based on nation-states
with their legal resources and sound science and to the new forms of
(multilevel, multiactor) governance that have recently dominated the
political sciences and public administration literature? Third, the vari-
ations in sprouts of informational governance around the globe will be
emphasised, balancing the idea of a development towards a universal
new mode of environmental governance worldwide. Fourth, an assess-
ment is made of informational governance in terms of its environmen-
tal relevance (or effectiveness, conventional scholars would say) and
its consequence for issues of democracy, new power balances, and the
inclusion and exclusion of various actors and interests related to envi-
ronmental reforms. Who are the winners and losers? Finally, a new
agenda is formulated, based on these assessments: an agenda both for
environmental governance under conditions of a global network soci-
ety and for further research.