Information, governance, and sustainable development

The article shows that the text of Rio's Agenda 21, which gives a prominent place to the role of information, views that information differently in di fferent parts of the report. The first two parts, devoted to technical issu es, focus largely on information flowing from top to bottom, from the inter national and the national to the local level. The third part, which focuses on actors, deals with the right of access to information. The last chapter pursues that theme by considering everyone to be both a user and a provide r of information. It is essential that information be brought to the very h eart of decision-making since it is a major element of governance. Informat ion must be operative locally; it must flow not only from top to bottom, bu t from bottom to top as well as horizontally within the networks exchanging observations and experiences. One must be sensitive to language barriers a nd to the richness of multilingualism. To satisfy these various objectives, the Internet offers a variety of opportunities, notably through the use of meta-information systems such as protocols and thesauri, and through the d evelopment of local resource centers.