Environmental Engineering Reference
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are drawn in different ways compared to conventional environmental
governance, giving new opportunities and threats for different actors
in environmental politics.
This is not fundamentally different at a global level. Developing
countries, such as China and Vietnam, have been part of global infor-
mational developments to a different extent and in different ways.
Although Vietnam, and numerous sub-Saharan African countries, are
having a difficult time linking to the key informational highways that
connect the most developed and dynamic hubs and nodes of the globe,
this is to a lesser extent so for parts of eastern China. This also reflects
on new modes of environmental governance. On all informational
indicators that are of relevance for informational governance of the
environment China as a whole - and even more the Western parts of
China - score(s) higher than Vietnam: PCs, Internet connections, envi-
ronmental movements, environmental labels and standards, media
openness and so on. Although it seems justified to conclude that the
conditions for informational innovations in environmental governance
in China are overall better than in Vietnam (cf. Mol and van Buuren,
2003
; Carter and Mol,
2006
; see also Chapter
10
), it is not easy to draw
any conclusions on the better or more effective environmental gover-
nance of China vis--vis Vietnam (if a comparison between such different
countries could be made at all). What could at least be hypothesised
is that the further integration of China in the global network econ-
omy and society relates to its swifter transformation in environmen-
tal governance, towards the inclusion of informational elements. Of
course, we should be careful of too simple convergence and homogeni-
sation schemes in global environmental governance, as place-bound
local specifics do codetermine modes of environmental governance.
3
But a clear, although complicated, relation exists between the (spa-
tial) patterns of informational governance of the environment and the
spreading of new networked forms of the informational economy and
society. That means that informational governance is especially ade-
quate for governing institutions, networks and flows that make up this
3
Pollitt (
2001
) makes a useful classification in public management convergence
by distinguishing four forms (and, according to him, stages): discursive
convergence, decisional convergence, practice convergence and results
convergence. With respect to our assessment and comparison, we can at best
expect to find the first two forms of informational governance convergence,
and, incidentally, perhaps the third.
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