Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 20

beyond the conventional information themes and approaches that have
prevailed in the environmental social sciences until now. We cannot
limit ourselves to social constructivism, to attitude-behaviour models,
to better informed policy models or to the direct environmental bene-
fits and costs of the ICT revolution. Nor can we just rely on the new
governance literature, as introduced earlier. The crucial environment-
related aspects of the Information Age, of ICT systems, of global infor-
mation flows, are to be found beyond these research traditions. The
Information Age poses an entire new set of themes and questions on
environmental governance, which the Information Age literature and
the governance literature have only partly addressed. Such new ques-
tions and themes include, among others, issues of
growing uncertainties that come along with growing availability of
increasing amounts of environmental information for an ever-wider
community;
growing vulnerabilities of polluters in terms of blaming their unsus-
tainable production practices and products by governmental, market
and civil society actors;
enhanced possibilities of monitoring the environmental consequences
of practices over ever larger distances in shorter time spans; and
not just by states but also by local communities, households, private
companies and international organisations;
new questions of surveillance and countersurveillance now that
potentials for information and monitoring skyrocket;
new questions of power and democracy in environmental struggles,
now that information, information technologies and uncertainties
have become so central: Who has access to information, who owns
information, who controls and governs information flows, who ver-
ifies and certifies information, who is able to build trust related to
information packages?
the relation between these new informational modes of environmen-
tal governance and the conventional state regulation on the environ-
ment: the effectiveness of environmental governance 'through' infor-
mation, the distributional dimensions of informational governance
(both within one country, as across countries) and the materialisation
of such governance in different settings, practices and institutional
arrangements and designs.