Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 285

difficult to catch and governed through conventional modes only.
Complexity scholars especially focus on this modality, emphasising
the uncontrollable, unpredictable, nonlinear and unmanageable flu-
ids when governance is absent. Energy systems and their relations to
climate change, the global car system and global fisheries are typical
examples of such global fluids that lack a centre, are unstructured and
complex and will not easily be governed; at least not through conven-
tional (national or international) governance modes. Here, informa-
tional governance can be expected to become dominant, informational
resources become powerful and prevailing in environmental gover-
nance, and the centre of environmental politics is relocated from state
politics to the media, symbols, reputation and legitimation, and non-
state global actor networks. Especially when new, transnational and
globalised, complex and unstructured, mobile and fluid sustainability
problems emerge informational governance seemed to have become
the dominant mode of environmental governance.
5. Assessing informational governance: environment and
democracy
Finally, the question is, of course, how do we assess informational gov-
ernance? Although often the initial focus, such an assessment should
not only - or not even primarily - concentrate on conventional crite-
ria of environmental effectiveness, as I will argue later in this section.
And how should actors in defence of environmental quality strate-
gically operate under conditions of an emerging informational order
and governance? Where lie the crucial sites of power and influence for
environmentalists (which are no longer to be defined only within the
NGO community as ecological modernisation scholars have argued so
forcefully), and where are the potential dangers and threats?
In their continuous discussions with the economic and political
powers environmentalists in public, private and civil society organi-
sations and arrangements have always been primarily worried about
environmental effects of dominant economic patterns, practices and
institutions and the environmental effectiveness of various gover-
nance institutions and arrangements that address these environmen-
tal deteriorations. No matter how wide the environmental agenda has
developed - for example, with the introduction of notions of sustain-
ability and quality of life - environmental quality remains at its center.