PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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equity-oriented political economists, Trans-European Networks are thus largely designed
to support the interests of powerful, trans-national private sector interests. Since the socalled
“missing links” are largely intended to eliminate “bottlenecks” (also see Chapter 6)
and improve international through traffic, the benefits to the local economies in which the
links are to be built are likely to be relatively minor. Nevertheless, political economists
point out, the local and regional governments are still expected to shoulder a major part
of the financial burden of constructing the infrastructures.
Political economists increasingly use discourse analysis to point to persisting
inequalities and discrepancies between rhetoric and reality in the transport sector. 38
A
concise presentation of a such a discourse-oriented political economy perspective in
transport was recently published by Guy Baeten in his article Tragedy of the Highway:
Empowerment, disempowerment and the politics of sustainability discourses and
practices. Chapter 2 already quoted his political-economy definition of sustainable
transport. His overall argument, summarized in the abstract, is the following:
The orthodox sustainable transport vision leads to the further empowerment of
technocratic and elitist groups in society while simultaneously contributing to the
further disempowerment of those marginalized social groups who were already
bearing the burden of the environmental problems resulting from a troubled transport
system. … The issues of transport inequality and transport poverty should be reinserted
into the dominant transport polity [sic] debates and practices.
(Baeten 2000:69)
There are several important aspects to this transport-oriented political economy
argument, which is why I shall discuss the article in some detail here. For one, Baeten is
one of the few European advocates for an environmental justice perspective to
38 Clearly, I would include myself in this category.