From online booksellers highlighting interesting items, social networking sites encouraging users to divulge personal information and auction sites using reputation-based systems to reassure consumers entering into transactions with strangers, computers can, and do, change human behaviour and have changed society in dramatic ways. There is, as a result, a considerable interest in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for environmental regulation (ER). However, while there is now a substantial body of literature on regulation and ICT, this focuses on either the regulation of information (such as data protection) or the regulation of communications (such as freedom of speech online). It is also predominantly concerned with ICT as something to be regulated, rather than on the use of ICT for regulation (e-regulation). This presentation attempts to fill this gap.

1. Image: European Space Agency
Information and Communications
Technology and Environmental
Regulation: Critical Perspectives
Rónán Kennedy
School of Law, National University of Ireland
Galway
ronan.m.kennedy@nuigalway.ie

2. ICTs and Behaviour
Change
Reducing complex behaviours to simple tasks
Guiding users through a process or experience
Providing content tailored to individuals
Suggesting behaviour at opportune moments
Eliminating tedium of tracking
Observing the behaviour of others
Providing positive reinforcement

3. Benefits of ICT for ER
New modes of regulation
Improved resource efficiency
Increased effectiveness

4. Applications of ICT
Information gathering
Remote sensors
Waste management
Land-use change
Fisheries protection
Remote harvest reporting
Vessel monitoring systems

5. Applications of ICT
Analysis and modelling
Support for compliance and enforcement
MARPOL, Kyoto Protocol
Managing markets for intangible property
Water rights, emissions trading

6. Applications of ICT
Information dissemination and ‘reflexive’ regulation
Environmental Monitoring for Public Access and
Community Tracking (EMPACT)
Envirofacts (http://www.epa.gov/enviro/)
Scorecard (http://scorecard.goodguide.com)
Toxics Release Inventory (http://www.epa.gov/TRI/)
Google Carbon Footprint Calculator

7. Applications of ICT
‘Smart’ goods, services and processes:
Smart logistics
Smart buildings
Smart grids and smart meters
Smart products

8. Disclosure as a
Regulatory Tool
Public distribution of information as a driver for
change (‘reflexive’ regulation)
History:
1930s: financial regulation
1960s/70s: environmental law, health and safety
Now: widely used

9. Rationales for
Disclosure
Signal to stock markets
Social impact (‘naming and shaming’)
Benchmarking against peers
Faster regulatory response
Overcoming individual bounded rationality

10. Difficulties with
Disclosure
Replicating the weaknesses of command-and-control
Strategic reporting and gaming the system
Accuracy of information
Intractable individual habits
Unpredictable results
Difficulties in analysing cost/benefit
Muddying the rule of law

11. Improving Disclosure-
Based Regimes
Standardised methods and metrics
Making behaviour change a norm
Use as an element of or alternative to conventional
regulation?

12. Information in
Environmental Regulation
Often flawed and incomplete
ICT expanding the scope and span of control?
Measurement often imprecise
Costs difficult to estimate
Methodologies rarely produce useful figures
More information is not necessarily better

13. Science in the
Regulatory Process
Contested role:
Objective truth or uncertain knowledge?
Challenged as product of ideology
‘Post-normal science’
Law and science: incompatible cultures?

14. Models in the Policy-
Making Process
Fundamental to constructing policy context:
Catalyst for policy
Structure for regulatory decision-making
Mechanism for collaboration
Often codified in software

15. Difficulties with Models
Scientific literacy of audience?
Accuracy and currency of models?
Data: Accurate? Verifiable? Consistent?
Over-optimistic or over-simplistic use
Models as proxy for real debate
Risk of manipulation

16. E-government
Perspectives
Focus on the citizens as consumer
Sees government activity as single step decision-
making
Significant gap in research on “e-regulation”

17. E-Regulation
“The use of ICT within regulators and those who
deal with them, such as NGOs, as an integral part
of the process of measurement, assessment and
feedback which is central to regulation.”
Cannot simply re-use private sector experiences

18. ICT and Regulation
Benefits: cheaper, more, quicker, better, new
Improvements:
Better informed
More targeted
More iterative
More transparent and democratic

19. Difficulties with E-
Regulation
ICT not neutral or deterministic
Impact on existing imbalances?
Disempowering external actors
Brake on change:
Institutional
Organisational
Procedural

20. ICT and Legal
Processes
Legal processes neither simple nor linear
Not easily modelled by logic or expert systems
Risk of destructive feedback cycle
ICT as embedded and entrenched infrastructure

21. Recommendations
Design principles:
Flexibility
Rule of law
Human rights
Open, re-usable data