Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 16

divides in international environmental governance and the strategic
misuse of environmental information. It is exactly these contrasting
ideas - these two sides of the same coin - that construct the building
stones for developing a new environmental governance perspective,
what I will label informational governance on the environment. Such
a perspective tries to grasp how, in which way and to what extent the
Information Society/Age is changing the social processes and dynamics
of environmental governance and reform.

6. Shifting (environmental) governance

The emergence of informational governance should be understood in
relation to the relatively recent debate on (modes of) governance. At
the turn of the millennium, a debate on new forms and modes of gover-
nance emerged especially in the political sciences (and to a lesser extent
in other social sciences) in the industrialised world. Although certainly
not restricted to the environmental domain, the governance debate
often uses environmental examples for illustrating the contemporary
changes that are believed to be taking place in governing practices.
In summarising the different modes of governance, the NEWGOV
( 2004 ) project comes with a classification in which the actors involved
and the steering modes form the two crucial dimensions that deter-
mine the seven modes of governance, as summarised in Table 1.1 .In
reviewing the complex debate on (new) 10 modes of governance Treib
et al. ( 2007 ) make a differentiation in three dimensions of governance
that helps to understand the variations in modes of governance:
politics, polity and policy. Within politics, modes of governance differ
with respect to the degree of involvement of private actors. Within
policy, modes of governance differ with respect to legal bindingness
versus soft law, rigid versus flexible approaches to implementation, the
prevalence or absence of sanctions, procedural rather than material
regulation and malleable instead of fixed norms. And within polity,
modes of governance can be distinguished according to market
structure and dynamics vis- a-vis hierarchy, a central versus a dispersed

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Treib et al. ( 2007 ) consider the labels 'old' and 'new' not very useful as what is
old in one field or domain of governance might be new in another. Instead,
they prefer analytical categories and distinctions to sort out and categorize
different modes of governance. Although this is correct and useful, one cannot
deny that there does exist a temporality in the different modes of
environmental governance.