PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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5.1 Introduction
Previous chapters have presented a comprehensive outline and overview of five
different discursive frameworks for sustainable policy-making, claiming that EU policy is
influenced by an eco-modernist understanding of sustainable development that avoids a
radical confrontation of environmental and social issues. This chapter undertakes a more
text-oriented review of the most important documents defining the EU’s understanding of
sustainable development, transport and land use in order to support this claim. 1
The
following chapter will then present a more structural, comprehensive evaluation of the
central biases apparent in EU transport policy. 2
Of course, there are scores of EU documents providing definitions and inputs on
the topic of sustainability and sustainable development, but not all documents carry equal
weight. In this chapter, I mostly analyze official EU documents, focusing on various
legally binding EU treaties and acts, on Commission White and Green Papers, as well as
1 The methodology for the document review was as follows: Every paper (or webpage) was first reviewed
for general content. In the vast majority of cases, the documents were available electronically (either in MS
Word or Adobe PDF format), so that they could then also be systematically searched for occurrences of
phrases such as “sustainable development,” “sustainability,” “transport, “mobility,” “land-use” etc. The
extensive cross-referencing common in Commission materials reassured me that no crucial documents were
left out of the analysis. Meanwhile, I of course did leave out scores of EU transport policy documents that
are not explicitly centered around sustainability discourses – also see the note below. In addition to the
actual documents, I reviewed additional press releases, supplementary materials, as well as various
(supportive and antagonistic) lobby group reactions to the different Commission papers in order to
supplement my own reading of the central contents with what various stakeholders had identified as its key
statements. So while often starting off with very text-oriented analyses, I go beyond simple word-by-word
document review in almost all individual analyses and instead strive to capture the larger discourses that
emerged from a particular document.
2 To clarify: Contrary to the following chapter, the focus in this chapter lies on policy documents
expressing official EU rhetoric in the area of sustainability and sustainable transport and mobility. Almost
by definition, a review of these documents will not necessarily be sufficient for gaining a full
understanding of the conflicted general development objectives influencing EU transport infrastructure
investment decisions. Not all EU transport investment decisions even pretend to address sustainability
aims. This is why some of the documents analyzed in the following chapter are not discussed in this
chapter and vice versa.