Introduction: new frontiers of environmental governance - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 21

It is exactly these kinds of issues, themes and questions that form a cen-
tral lead throughout the second part of this volume: Chapters 5 to 9 .
As informational governance is still very much in the making (or
very much a promise, as some might claim), not all questions can be
answered fully and with full evidence. In many cases, we will only be
able to sketch the contours of what the Information Age will mean
for environmental monitoring programs, for the role of states and
government authorities, for environmental NGOs and their strate-
gies, for private environmental governance and the involvement of
private sectors in environmental struggles and reforms; or in short:
for new forms of environmental governance. As such, informational
governance explains the emergence and working of nonhierarchical,
nonlegal and noneconomic modes of governance, by focusing on the
growing centrality of informational processes and resources. In doing
so, at the same time it repairs the information omission prevailing in
most governance literature.
7. Information-poor environments
If we are to investigate what the Information Age means for shifts in
environmental governance, we are most likely to find such changes
and innovations within the informational centres of global moder-
nity. Hence, the emphasis in analysing informational governance devel-
opments in this volume will be on the informational nodes, hubs
and highways of our Information Society, or, in other words, within
information-rich environments. It goes without saying that within the
different (geographical) settings of the Information Society these infor-
mational modes diverge somewhat, as a result of, among others, the
(national) cultural backgrounds, the policy styles and culture and the
economic structure. Finland with its advanced informational technolo-
gies, the United States with transnational commercial empires domi-
nating the media, the Netherlands with its relatively good access of
nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) to environmental governance
and Japan with a not too transparent policy culture will all have their
particularities in informational governance. Several of these particular-
ities among countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) will pass when we analyse the emergence of
informational governance along the informational highway. Although