Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 18

locus of authority and institutionalised versus less formally institution-
alised interactions. Although the two categorisations are somewhat
different, to a large extent similar developments and categories can be
witnessed.
These developments and categories are in a similar way reflected in
other overviews and studies in the governance tradition, such as those
of Héritier ( 2002 ), Kooiman ( 2003 ), van Kersbergen and van Waar-
den ( 2004 ), Pierre and Peters ( 2005 ), and Jordan and Schout ( 2006 ).
Most of such studies in the governance tradition notice, describe and
classify new forms of governing societal sectors and problems. Com-
mon among these authors are observations on (i) the growing involve-
ment and power of nongovernmental actors in an increasing num-
ber of governing arrangements; (ii) the diversification of the modes of
governing, diverting from a monopoly of law-based regulatory inter-
vention towards a plurality of approaches and steering modes and
(iii) the interdependencies of different levels of governance, ranging
from local via national and European to truly global, and the complex-
ities coming along with that. In explaining the diversification in forms
and modes of governance the literature is less elaborated, mostly refer-
ring to processes of globalisation (in its various dimensions), growing
complexities and uncertainties and the changing authority of science
and the nation-state institutions.
Studies on changing modes of environmental governance have been
at the foundation of, as well as built on, this more general literature on
shifts in governance. Building on early studies of state failure in envi-
ronmental protection (e.g., J anicke, 1986 ), and following ideas of polit-
ical modernisation (in the EU) or reinventing government (in the North
American continent), environmental social scientists have been timely
in calling for and noticing shifts in environmental governance. Lemos
and Agrawal ( 2006 ) provide an extensive overview of the changes in
environmental governance analysed and described in the environmen-
tal social science literature, focusing on four dimensions: globalisation,
decentralisation, market-based governance and cross-scale (or multi-
level) governance. Again, similar categories and dimensions of change
emerge: new actors, nonhierarchical and nonlegal steering modes, flex-
ibility, dispersed locus of authority, less institutionalised interactions
and so on. Chapter 3 further reviews and investigates the literature and
debates on the shifts in environmental governance and environmen-
tal reform, and thus constructs - after Chapter 2 on the Information