Consumer-oriented Monitoring
Consumer oriented monitoring (COM) is intended to reverse traditional use-flow monitoring systems that provide producers with the information necessary to effectively market and bill. In constrast to this traditional approach that tends to emphasis individual use and consumer culpability, COM monitors in the other direction, providing consumers information on the production side of their use: e.g., resulting emissions and what generative-sources are used. Such an approach, while maintaining awareness of individual choice consequences, does not veil the choices and impacts of producers.
Eco-teams
Eco-teams have been an important development in consumer-oriented monitoring. This involves assemblies of groups that work to document their environmental impacts, and then compare their achievements with other groups. Along side the self-rating, the groups provide each other with tips on lessons learned that could benefit everyone’s future efforts. These eco-teams were developed by an NGO (The Empowerment Institute) in the USA, but have spread to almost all of Western Europe as well as Slovenia, Russia, Japan and South Korea.
Second generation eco-teams have expanded their monitoring beyond consumption self-monitoring, to demands for information from producers that allows them to draw a more detailed self-profile. The more developed example of this has been the Liveable Neighborhood Program of the Global Action Plan, conceived as a tool for knowledge creation that can aid local government in service delivery and community health.
Scorecards
Scorecards, developed by the US.-based NGO Environmental Defense Fund, provide information on local pollution via a web site (www.environmentaldefense.org). The site is freely accessible and enables people to search by postal code or pollutant category to gain information for their locality on the extent, nature and source of pollution. A practice that has extended to several countries – including Canada, the UK, Australia and the Netherlands – the scorecard web site has served as an incentive for discussion, education and public advocacy.
A controversy surrounding these initiatives is their practice of replacing a vocabulary of scientific rigor, which may be confusing and even alienating to some, with generally accessible translations that emphasize popular understanding.
den Burg, Sander W. K. van, et al. "Consumer-oriented monitoring and environmental reform," Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, 21(3) 2003, 371-388
The authors provide an alternative to conventional environmental monitoring methods, and their implicit regulatory significance. In contrast to monitoring regimes that reduce regulatable practices to those of the consumer, while accumulating information that can enhance marketing and billing for producers, and increasing the state’s intrusion into people’s private lives, the authors explore means by which consumers can monitor their own practices, and integrate that knowledge with institutional actions of producers. Such monitoring, without losing sight of consumption, integrates production concerns into a model that allows a more holistic, integrated regulation while empowering citizens as consumers. They examine a couple examples of such citizen-oriented monitoring that have been spreading internationally over the last decade.
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