Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
4
Informational governance
1. Introduction
As we saw in Chapter
2
, claims on the formative powers of information
and information technologies in social processes, practices and institu-
tions have been emphasised several times during the past four decades.
Most recently, Manuel Castells especially has argued powerfully that
a new generation of sociotechnical information systems, parallelled by
globalisation processes, has radically changed the outlook of modern
society. Chapters
2
and
3
clarified that, although these informational
developments coincided with ongoing calls for and practices of envi-
ronmental transformation and reform, the place of information and
information technologies in the sociological and political science liter-
ature on environmental reform has been marginal.
This chapter starts from the premise that we can no longer keep
separated the discourse on Information Society and the Information
Age, on the one hand, and the discourse on environmental governance
and reform, on the other. If the Information Age literature is right in
claiming that information and information technology are reorganis-
ing modern life, it will also affect processes, practices and institutions
of environmental governance and reform. In investigating and under-
standing to what extent and how contemporary processes of environ-
mental reform are affected by information and information technol-
ogy this chapter combines the literature and insights on Information
Society/Information Age (Chapter
2
), on the one hand, with the politi-
cal sciences and sociological studies and perspectives on environmental
governance (Chapter
3
), on the other. I will label the idea of increas-
ing importance of information, information technologies and infor-
mational processes in environmental governance and reform: informa-
tional governance (Section
2
). Informational governance refers then to
institutions and practices of - in our case, environmental - governance
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