Elsevier

Environmental Science & Policy

Volume 56, February 2016, Pages 89-99
Environmental Science & Policy

Review
Informational governance – A systematic literature review of governance for sustainability in the Information Age

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2015.11.006Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Informational governance enhances the role of information for future sustainability.

  • Governance actors can benefit from new conditions provided by the Information Age.

  • New conditions provided by the Information Age transform governance institutions.

  • Informational governance has different meaning across geographical regions.

  • Increased information exchange leads to more institutional interconnectivity.

Abstract

The rapid developments in all kinds of new information technologies, information networks and social media are increasingly affecting societies around the world. The so termed Information Age not only influences social relationships, economy and science, but also governance. Against this background and in the specific field of sustainability, informational governance is an emerging concept. It addresses two interrelated processes: (1) new forms of governing through information, and (2) transformative changes in governance institutions due to the new information flows. The aim of this article is to gain more insights into ways in which the Information Age impacts sustainability, and to suggest a research agenda with relevance to the field of informational governance. A systematic literature review resulted in a selection of 39 articles, of which 23 and 16 articles were identified in two-parallel searches. The increased human interconnectedness through e-governance, self-organization, private governing and empowerments are identified as core informational governance trends dealing with sustainability in the Information Age, and essential to future research.

Introduction

Societies around the world are increasingly affected by rapid developments in all kinds of new information technologies, information networks, and social media. In our daily life, the so termed Information Age influences our social relationships (Twitter, Facebook and whatsApp), our economy (virtual auction), our science (scientific information losing much of its credibility and authority due to a variety of other information sources), and our politics (WikiLeaks). The Information Age has been widely studied and theorized upon but also strongly celebrated and heavily criticized.

The centrality of information in the Information Age increasingly impacts governance processes (Bichler, 2007, Clifford, 2009, Işik, 2013, Seraj, 2012). Governance can be addressed analytically by describing institutions as ‘the patterns that emerge from the governing activities of social, political and administrative actors’ (Gerritsen et al., 2013), but also by emphasizing processes meant for guiding, steering, controlling or managing sectors or facets of societies (Kooiman, 1993, p. 2). On the one hand, the hyper-connectivity across the globe opens up enormous possibilities for information exchange, knowledge creation, feedback, debate, learning and innovation, social networking, marketing and advertising. On the other hand, it erodes the power of classic public and private institutions as nobody is in control of information. Whereas conventional governance highly relies on authoritative resources, belief in information control and state power, in the Information Age uncontrolled flows of information is becoming a crucial (re)source with transformative powers for a variety of actors (Mol, 2008).

In particular, information plays a key role in governing environmental issues such as climate change, biodiversity loss, depleting resources and competing land use claims. Human–environmental relationships are complex issues because of time-lags between human actions and environmental effects and the lack of understanding of multiple scaled ecological systems (Underdal, 2010).

Against this background, informational governance (Mol, 2008) is emerging as a new concept in the field of environmental policy and sustainability issues. It addresses two interrelated processes: (1) new forms of governing through information, and (2) transformative changes in governance institutions due to the new information flows appearing in the Information Age. The informational governance concept is inspired by Castells (1996, p. 21) who in a similar manner within a market context distinguishes between ‘information economy’ referring to flows of information, and ‘informational economy’ linking it with institutional change. Institutions are here interpreted broadly, accounting for formal as well as informal rules which encourage or restrain actors’ behaviours, and which influence the structures of contexts for acting (Ostrom, 2009).

The main aims of this article are to gain more insights into informational governance, and to suggest a research agenda. At present, literature that explicitly uses the key word informational governance is limited to six articles (Hoefnagel et al., 2013, Mol, 2006, 2009; Naus et al., 2014, Toonen and Lindeboom, 2015, Toonen and Mol, 2013). All these studies are connected with the same research community (Wageningen University and Research Centre, the Netherlands). Special applications have been conducted in research fields such as energy (Naus et al., 2014) and marine governance (Hoefnagel et al., 2013, Toonen and Mol, 2013).

Although we recognize that the concept of informational governance is hardly mentioned in the literature, we note that social, environmental and economic sciences contribute to informational governance. Particularly, we refer to literature addressing environmental policy and sustainability contexts, which link to new information technologies, new information flows and emanating institutional structures in the Information Age. Accordingly, in this article we systematically explore literature within the environmental governance domain to gain more insights into ways by which the Information Age impacts sustainability. More precisely, this paper addresses the following questions:

  • a.

    How does the emerging use of information and information technologies influence governing of firms, communities, citizens or consumers behaviours towards sustainability (referred to as governing through information)?

  • b.

    How does new information generation, processing and transmission influence change in sustainability governance institutions in terms of norms, rules, relations, processes and organization (referred to as institutional change due to information flows)?

  • c.

    How can these insights be used to identify research gaps and develop a research agenda for informational governance in the field of sustainability?

The method of systematic literature review is used to answer these questions (Kampen and Tamás, 2013). In Section 2 we explain how we have applied the systematic literature review method to analyze (a) governing through information, and (b) institutional change due to information flows. This is followed by both quantitative (Section 3) and qualitative (Section 4) analyses conducted to present some core findings of the systematic literature review. Finally, a discussion and concluding remarks are provided (Section 5), including an articulation of a proposed research agenda.

Section snippets

Method – a systematic literature review

The literature relating to informational governance was reviewed systematically by using a transparent and reproducible method for selecting literature. Systematic reviews are rapidly growing in importance in the social sciences to aggregate findings across multiple empirical studies, a method which extensively has been used in medical disciplines (Bilotta et al., 2014, Kampen and Tamás, 2013, Moore et al., 2014). In contrast with the traditional reviews, the systematic literature reviews avoid

Quantitative analyses of the selected literature

With this quantitative analyses we aim at getting a general picture of the selected literature. In particular, we analyze how the selected literature is distributed over geographical regions, sciences domains and specific sustainability issues. In short, these analyses show that European, Asian and United States (US) based articles contribute the largest shares, while African and South American contributions are relatively small (Fig. 2). It also illustrates that social and environmental

Governing through information

Based on the literature review in search 1 we particularly address the relations between governing through information and sustainability in the Information Age. This literature is relevant to both developed and developing country contexts. About half of the selected articles contributes with empirical analyses, the rest is basically descriptive. Based on the selected literature, we identified some six insights of governing through information, accounted for in the following.

E-governance of

Discussion and concluding remarks

In this article we explore literature addressing how the Information Age affects environmental governance aiming for sustainability. Through a systematic literature review we selected 39 articles, of which 23 belong to the search for governing through information (search 1), and the other 16 were identified by searching for institutional change due to information flows (search 2) (only one article is double counted). Note that, although different geographical areas, far outside the scope of

Acknowledgements

This article is written as part of the “Informational Governance” Research Program of Wageningen University and Research Centre (WUR), to contribute to solutions for the most pressing global environmental problems. The programme is co-financed by the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. We also would like to thank colleagues who shared their thoughts about this article in the Public Administration Group and Environmental Policy Group at WUR. Also, related with the insights provided about the

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