Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 14

and positive environmental side effects of ICT and its application. The
TERRA 2000 research project, part of the sixth EU framework pro-
gram, equally looked into and tried to assess the potential (future) con-
tribution of Information Society technologies to sustainable develop-
ment. 9 Studies of Salzman ( 1999 ) and Forseback ( 2000 ) and analyses
such as those of Slob and van Lieshout ( 2002 ) are in the same tradition.
A recent EU study by Erdmann and colleagues ( 2004 ) assesses impacts
between minus 20 percent and plus 30 percent in environmental dete-
rioration/improvement by 2020, due to ICT.
These studies find their limitations in predominantly a technological
definition of the information revolution, although some studies (such as
the one of Slob and van Lieshout, 2002 ) include organisational dynam-
ics and consequences. What is new today, compared to say the 1980s, is
basically another technological profile of modern society, and we have
to assess what the direct and indirect environmental consequences in
terms of 'additions and withdrawals' are - and can be - of these new
technologies, technological systems and technological potentials. The
typical questions of this research paradigm are: Do these new tech-
nologies produce more or less waste, do the make production more
or less environmentally efficient, can they replace material needs for
nonmaterial needs, do they lead to less or more resource extraction
and emissions?
Few environmental studies on the information revolution broaden
the scope a little further, beyond the direct environmental effects of
ICT and information systems. In these broader studies, there is a sec-
ond group of studies that can be labelled 'nothing new to report'.
Most of these see the information revolution, and the information tech-
nology linked to that, as nothing really new: it is just another phase
of global capitalism, in which ICT might reorganise production and
consumption processes in new time-space constellations but not into
fundamentally different environmental profiles, consequences and pro-
cesses. E-business, flexible network companies, global capital flows, a
worldwide telecommunication network might all restructure the global
economy, but they leave the material underpinnings as well and the fun-
damental power imbalances largely unaltered. Nothing fundamentally

9

This research project ran from 1998 to 2003 and was carried out by various
national research teams in Europe. For the various outputs of this project, as
well as its final report, see http://www.terra-2000.org.