PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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1.6 Personal Motivations for Choosing the Area of Inquiry
Not only are there many different ways to organize a case study, there are also
many different reasons for doing it. In my case, the formulation of the below described
research questions and propositions evolved and developed out of the professional work I
had been doing for an international non-governmental organization in New York 8 which
provides technical assistance to environmental groups in Central Europe in the area of
sustainable transport advocacy. Of course, as is also documented in this study, most
environmental NGOs have a particular normative view of what “sustainability” means in
the area of transport, and this view is neither fully congruent with interpretations
presented by the European Union nor with that of the business community. The goal of
my thesis, however, is less a verification or a falsification of one particular view on the
environment and on sustainability than an exploratory analysis of the “contextual
discourses” arising from the issue of EU transport sector investment decision-making in
the particular context of enlargement. The thesis thus provided me with a welcome
opportunity to “step back” from an area of work that I had become politically involved in
and to look at it from a more detached, more de-politicized perspective. In particular, I
wanted to re-visit some questions for which the environmental movement often has alltoo-easy
and limited answers. Attacking decision-makers for their lack of action
whenever a particular Habitats or Birds Directive is not recognized by investors, for
example, is useful in that it applies pressure where it is most effective politically, e.g. at
the level of legally sanctioned environmental agendas. What is missing from such a
8 The name of the NGO is the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). See www.ITDP.org.