by DEIKE PETERS
The study investigates the underlying rationalities of transport sector decisionmaking in Europe. The research seeks to explain discrepancies between the sustainability objectives expressed in EU Commission documents and the reality of EU-led transport sector investments. The study also shows how key defining concepts and justifications are adapted and/or modified in the specific context of EU pre-accession funding for Central Eastern Europe. The investigation is framed by six propositions which assume that sustainability remains an ill-defined concept; that ecological modernization is the dominant discourse in EU decision-making; that EU transport infrastructure investments are dominated by conflicting storylines; that decision-making is additionally complicated through varying decisional powers and challenges of multi-location politics; and that ecological modernization discourses tend to underestimate the local impacts of transport infrastructures.
A key conceptual innovation is provided by the notion of discursive frameworks. By distinguishing the five discursive frameworks of ecological modernization, reflexive modernization, communicative rationality, political economy and renunciation, the study develops a fivefold typology of sustainable policy-making in Europe. The dominant ecological modernization perspective is a modernist model of development that is relatively successful in integrating a variety of environmental concerns into its framework, but that nevertheless privileges competitiveness and economic growth over alternative development goals. In the case of pan-European transport infrastructures, such a growth-oriented perspective translates into a predominance of industry-favored investment storylines of missing links and bottlenecks over alternative storylines of spatial cohesion and polycentric development. However, while the European Round Table of Industrialists greatly influenced the development of the EU’s Trans-European Networks in the mid-1990s, decisions over the TEN extensions into Central Eastern Europe were much less dominated by multi-national corporate interests.
The central summary insight of the study is the contextual discourse dilemma: planning and policy-making in modern capitalist democracies is dependent on developing universally applicable, integrative guiding visions such as sustainability to guide decision-making, yet these concepts only become useful tools for decision-makers if they are operationalized into concrete agendas which in turn translate into particular investment choices at the local level. Conversely, general discourses devoid of any applicability to local contexts are unlikely to gain widespread support.
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| Peri-urban Budapest, Hungry, by keepwaddling1 |
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