PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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(2001:2) recently summarized: “Communicative rationality has not been reviewed in
transportation journals; planning theory research seldom links to transportation
planning.” Since, thanks to Willson and a few others, there is now an emerging literature
on communicative rationality in transport planning, I decided to recognize it as a distinct
and policy-relevant development approach for the specific area of European transport
policy, even if there are currently no transport practitioners discernable at the EU level
who consistently practice such an approach. Nevertheless, I argue that it is important to
recognize “communicative rationality” as a distinct discursive framework with its own
distinct policy preferences, regardless of whether or not these policy preferences are
presently actualized or not. After all, since “ecological modernization” is so clearly the
dominant approach to EU transport policy and planning, most of the policy preferences
resulting from the other discursive frameworks are not being implemented at present
either. Note that there are some parallels between the increased currency the concept of
communicative rationality is gaining in planning and public policy circles and the current
debate over the future of European Governance, which culminated in the publication of
the EU’s White Paper on European Governance (also see Chapter 5).
The term “communicative rationality” inevitably evokes the name of Jürgen
Habermas. There is now an extensive literature entirely devoted to the elaboration of the
concept of communicative rationality and its application to planning and public policy,
variously presented under the label of communicative planning (Forester 1989; Sager
1994), communicative action (Innes 1995), argumentative planning (Fischer and Forester
1993), or collaborative planning / planning through debate (Healey 1992; Healey 1997).
It has even been interpreted as the new dominant “paradigm” for the sub-field of planning