Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 286

In assessing new modes of environmental governance a key concern
will indeed be related to what might instrumentally be labelled 'envi-
ronmental effectiveness'. Various studies have indeed concentrated on
the environmental effects of ICT systems and of new production and
consumption patterns and arrangements that followed the Informa-
tion Age (see those mentioned in Chapter 1 ). Others also have tried to
assess the effectiveness of new governance approaches and modes that
are stronger based on information such as data-driven environmental
regulation (cf. Esty, 2006) or voluntary, collaborative and information-
based approaches in environmental policy (cf. Norberg-Bohm and
de Bruijn, 2005 ). To be sure and short, it is not possible to give any gen-
eral and overall conclusion on how effective informational governance
protects environmental quality or governs environmental flows. After
the categorisation of the variety of informational governance arrange-
ments in three fundamentally different baskets (see earlier), this should
not surprise us too much. The environmental success of informational
governance can at best be assessed in concrete time-space contexts,
where specific arrangements operate in managing specific environmen-
tal flows and capital. Although even then results and assessments prove
to be difficult to interpret and generalise for various reasons, we should
at least be able to formulate conclusions and recommendations on spe-
cific improvements. Assessing the environmental successes of concrete
(that is, time-space specific) ecolabelling schemes, monitoring and dis-
closure practices, auditing and verification institutions, and informa-
tional campaigns can provide insight on how to improve such schemes
and arrangements, whether and how they should be connected with
conventional regulatory regimes, regarding what sociomaterial infras-
tructures and networks they seem to work better and where the sites of
power are located to make a difference. But that means at the same time
that any general and overall discussion or statement on the value (in
terms of their contribution to environmental protection) of informa-
tional governance vis--vis conventional governance is pointless. In line
with some of the scholars working on shifts in governance and (new)
modes of governance, we also have to concluded that it is not possible
to provide any overall preference for informational versus conventional
modes of environmental governance, or vice versa.
But there are other criteria to assess informational governance. A sig-
nificant part of the environmental movement has always understood
themselves as a social movement with a broader agenda. Democracy,