Introduction article: informational governance and environmental sustainability

Informational governance is a relatively new analytical concept explaining societal changes appearing in the Information Age, resulting from the massive new patterns of information flows. The main aim of this review is to identify the emerging issues in this new interdisciplinary field of science, within the context of environmental sustainability. Besides the existing literature on informational governance, new scientific contributions provided by this special issue are reviewed. The informational governance concept particularly contributes to analysing the rationale of the new patterns of information flows into the governance literature, and to gaining insights in how and why actors and institutions see their authorities being transformed into new arrangements. On the basis of the contributions to this special issue we specify future research topics in areas: information construction in policy processes, new relationships, transparency implications in environmental governance, new global arrangements and public engagement in the Information Age.