PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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national institution whose legitimacy as a planning and policy-making body is founded
on a mix of economic opportunism and geopolitical strategizing. While it would be
foolish to attempt to summarize the vast academic literature on the European Union in a
few paragraphs, at least a cursory revealing of scholarly preferences is in order.
Theories of the EU can be broadly divided between (realist) intergovernmentalist
perspectives that continue to stress the role of member-states in EU policy-making
(Moravcsik 1991; Moravcsik 1998; Peterson and Bomberg 1999) and institutionalist
accounts that consider a broader range of actors and focus on different levels and forms
of decision-making at the EU. The latter accounts are variously used to support theories
of (neo)-functionalism (Haas 1958), federalism (Scharpf 1999) or most generally, of
multi-level governance (see e.g. Marks, Hooghe et al. 1996; Bache 1998; Hix 1998).
Intergovernmentalist accounts are partially correct in asserting that national-level politics
continue to play a significant role in shaping European Union policies and programs.
However, much more attention indeed needs to be paid to the specific institutional setup
and the agency of particular interest groups to truly understand likely outcomes in
particular policy areas, especially in the case of transport.
Since this study is conceptualized much more within a urban
theory/planning/public policy tradition than within the political science sub-field of
European studies, my research should not primarily be understood as an explicit
contribution to the rapidly evolving institutionalist literature on multi-level governance in
the EU.
Nevertheless, I find Peterson and Bomberg’s (1999) three-fold model of EU
decision-making levels a very useful framework for analyzing different levels of EU
transport decision-making. Table 1.1 presents an adaptation of their model to the