Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 281

governance faces structural problems in dealing with, 'regulating'
and reforming powerful profit-driven private agents, organised in a
market economy. But, by stressing in such a general way continu-
ities, one easily misses the discontinuities and transformations, for
instance, in how capitalism is organised and functioning today. Under
conditions of globalisation and informationalisation, with a growing
centrality of old and new media dominating the public sphere, the
importance of information control (e.g., the American NSA with forty
thousand staff members; the increasing amount of satellites; the grow-
ing struggle over Internet traffic control), decreasing nation-state
power, growing system complexities and the high mobilities, contem-
porary 'capitalism' is fundamentally different from three decades ago.
These transformations - that is, within a largely capitalist order - call
for, trigger, force and determine new modes of - in our case - environ-
mental governance. And although one could argue that contemporary
modes of environmental governance do not fundamentally score bet-
ter than the state failures of the 1970s and 1980s, such a conclusion
misses any understanding of what is happening today. 2 Positions of
actors, power balances, coalitions, resource dependencies, the rules of
the 'environmental game', effective strategies and so on are changing
rapidly around environmental controversies. If we want to understand
current successes and failures, current strategies and discourses, cur-
rent power balances and inequalities, current inclusions and exclusions
around defining and handling environmental flows, we have to move
beyond general continuities and constantly look for and interpret spe-
cific dynamics, changes, innovations and - also - continuities. The new
modes and forms of environmental governance might not necessarily
be better, nor necessarily be worse; neither more successful nor entail-
ing larger failures; they should not be celebrated nor be condemned.
But these new dynamics are 'fitting' the new conditions of our mod-
ern order and have not emerged accidentally. Before any celebration

call imperial politics of environmental degradation, contrasting and challenging
our informational focus on environmental reform.

2

An interesting question would be whether the conventional system of
nation-state based regulatory environmental governance from the 1970s and
1980s would be more successful in dealing with today's environmental
challenges in a global network society than the emerging informational mode of
governance. There are good arguments to doubt how well the conventional
regulatory environmental governance model would fit today's complexities.