Balancing informational perspectives - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 290

of conventional regulatory regimes of environmental protection. And
these limitations are only becoming more evident in an era marked
by globalisation and reflexive modernity, resulting in the paradigmatic
shift from environmental regulation to environmental governance in
the 1990s. The emergence of a new informational mode of environ-
mental governance should be understood as part of this paradigmatic
shift. Informational governance, strongly triggered by and fitting into
wider developments in late modern society, searches for answers to the
weaknesses in conventional environmental regulatory programs. But
informational governance also has its own challenges, complications
and problems. In setting a new research agenda on informational gov-
ernance, I will outline four major themes.
The first theme for a research agenda relates to the dynamics and
mechanisms of informational governance in various empirical fields,
practices and system of environmental protection. Too little is known
about the forms, spreading, applications, and modes, and the effects
of informational governance of the environment. A more systematic
analysis of specific practices would provide us a better idea of its rel-
evance, impact and relation to conventional governance systems. Our
provisional categorisation in regions, integrated networks and global
fluids could be understood as a first attempt that is in need of more
substantial flesh and further detailing.
The second set of questions and challenges relates to structural uncer-
tainty, multiple knowledges and informational overflow. When infor-
mation and knowledge become crucial resources in and arenas of envi-
ronmental governance, how do we deal with a constant questioning
and revision of environmental knowledge and information, the related
uncertainties that seem to form a structural property of environmental
reform, and the problem of information overflow, as no undisputed
authorities are able to qualify these flows? What kind of new (science-
policy) arrangements, decision-making structures and practices, guid-
ing heuristics and principles, and 'closure mechanisms' are, can be, and
should be developed in informational environmental governance, in
order to prevent stalemate positions? The emergence of informational
governance should not make us blind to these questions and chal-
lenges, as much as ideas of radical uncertainty, multiple knowledges
and information overflow should not overlook (or even condemn) the
progressive, transformative powers of environmental information in
environmental reform.