Environmental Governance in the Information Age: The Emergence of Informational Governance

Abstract

Environment and information Environmental knowledge and information, and especially natural-science-based knowledge and information on the natural environment, has beenöand still isöa formative factor in the design of environmental protection measures, policies, and strategies. During the 1970s and 1980s, social scientists studying the environment largely neglected, or took for granted, the subject of environmental knowledge and information. It has only been since the late 1980s that environmental social scientists have started to pay significant attention to information in understanding efforts at environmental restructuring and reform. There are three main reasons to reconsider the contemporary role of knowledge and information in environmental reform. First, the amount of available environmental knowledge and information is growing on almost all environmental issues, for all kinds of decisionmakers (private and public, institutional and individual), through increasing scientific research, monitoring practices, information storage capacity, information transport, and scientific understanding. Here, environmental information refers not only to information on the state of the environment, or on the`additions and withdrawals' (the emissions and exploitation of natural resources), but to a wider category of knowledge and information, in any form, that has relevance for dealing with environmental challenges. (1) Second, up to now, the attention of social scientists on environmental knowledge and information has been

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