Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 277

2. Informational governance: what is it?
In exploring to what extent and in which way the joint forces of the
information revolution and globalisation will and do affect environ-
mental governance I have introduced the label informational gover-
nance . Informational governance refers not so much to the fact that
information is important for addressing and dealing with environmen-
tal challenges, as that has always been the case ever since modern states
started to develop and implement their environmental activities and
programs. Rather, the concept implies that for understanding the cur-
rent innovations and changes in environmental governance we have to
concentrate on the centripetal movement of informational processes,
informational resources and informational politics. It is the produc-
tion, the processing, the use and the flow of, as well as the access to
and the control over, information that is increasingly becoming vital in
environmental governance practices and institutions. Thus, the strate-
gies, actions and coalitions of actors in environmental politics and
governance, as well as the formation, design and functioning of institu-
tions for environmental governance, can no longer be understood with-
out focusing on information and knowledge. Information and knowl-
edge are becoming key resources in environmental politics, the sites
and spaces of environmental controversy relocate to information, and
the motivations and sources for changing unsustainable behaviour are
increasingly informational. The notion of informational governance
on the environment enables us to understand and assess the signif-
icance of reputational capital of companies, of legitimacy capital of
environmental NGOs, of transparency and disclosure policies, of new
environmental monitoring arrangements, and the digital turn in the
media - to name but a few - for environmental governance. Moreover,
rather than noticing these new trends as relatively unrelated develop-
ments in environmental politics, informational governance brings these
coherently together under one common denominator.
This centripetal movement of informational processes in today's
environmental governance is not an autonomous or endogenous pro-
cess that unfolds within the field of environmental governance. It
should not be understood as just the logical answer to the state and
governance shortcomings and failures in environmental policies. In the
foregoing chapters, I have shown that it is closely connected with, and
cannot be understood without paying attention to, a number of other