Introduction

As we saw in Chapter 2, claims on the formative powers of information and information technologies in social processes, practices and institutions 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 environmental transformation and reform, the place of information and information technologies in the sociological and political science literature 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 reorganising modern life, it will also affect processes, practices and institutions of environmental governance and reform. In investigating and understanding to what extent and how contemporary processes of environmental reform are affected by information and information technology this chapter combines the literature and insights on Information Society/Information Age (Chapter 2), on the one hand, with the political sciences and sociological studies and perspectives on environmental governance (Chapter 3), on the other. I will label the idea of increasing importance of information, information technologies and informational processes in environmental governance and reform: informational governance (Section 2).