Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 19

Society/Age - the second background chapter for developing the idea
of informational governance.

Informational governance

In the extensive literature on shifts in (environmental) governance, the
Information Age is largely missing; not unlike the missing environment
in the Information Society/Age literature. Daniel Esty ( 2004 )isone
of the few scholars noticing that “ the advance of the information

age has shifted our environmental protection 'possibility frontier' and
opened the door to a new era of pollution control and natural resource
management”. It is exactly here that this topic makes its contribu-
tion, both to the studies and insights on the Information Society/Age
as well as to the growing empirical evidence, literature and theories on
shifts in (environmental) governance. The new Information Age, with
its new technological paradigm and new social organisation, has poten-
tially far-reaching consequences for how modern society deals with its
environmental challenges. Or, to put it slightly different as a research
question: How, in what way and with what effects are systems, arrange-
ments and practices of environmental governance fundamentally
changing under conditions of - and through - the Information Age?
Our hypothesis will be that with the coming of the Information Age,
information can no longer be interpreted as just one of the - many -
factors that assists and enables governmental and nongovernmental
actors in designing and implementing environmental reform programs
and measures. With the Information Age, information is becoming a
crucial, causal and formative resource, but also a new battlefield, for
new modes of environmental governance, to be labelled informational
governance. Informational governance stretches far beyond the con-
ventional paradigms of environmental state regulation of the 1970s
and 1980s, and with that it shares many of the ideas of the (envi-
ronmental) governance literature that emerged from the mid-1990s
onward. But it significantly adds to that literature, in emphasising the
crucial role of information in these shifts in governance, to be coined
informational governance. In Chapter 4 ,Ielaborate on the notion and
perspective of informational governance, and the various (theoretical)
debates that come along with that.
It now becomes clear that if we want to understand how the 'infor-
mation revolution' affects environmental governance we have to look

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