PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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8.1 Introduction
This chapter will investigate EU pre-accession grant-making for transport
infrastructure investments under the EU ISPA (Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-
Accession) program. I review the first two years of ISPA transport-sector funding in two
of the most advanced candidate countries, Poland and Hungary. Until now, I
concentrated on the strategic aspects of EU transport decision-making, i.e. on transport
policies, plans and programs. Chapter 7 showed that the EU’s emphasis on creating an
international priority backbone network connecting the candidate countries to Western
Europe was the driving factor in the elaboration of the TINA network maps. TINA was a
declared effort to make the EU’s Pan-European priorities congruent with the accessions
countries’ own national infrastructure priorities. ISPA, by contrast, supports actual
infrastructure projects in the fields of transport and environment. 1
Hence, ISPA is clearly
the significant point of contact where EU transport sector decision-making and funding
rationalities meet national CEE government rationalities. I thus move away even further
from a discourse-focused approach towards a more reality-focused evaluation.
Of course, I will not attempt to evaluate the consequences of all international,
regional and local traffic and land use impacts of each individual transport project that
has received ISPA funding. Not only is this much beyond the scope of this study, it is
also still impossible at the present time. The European Union only officially launched its
ISPA program in April 2000. Since almost none of the infrastructures slanted for funding
in 2000 and 2001 have been completed, ISPA projects cannot yet undergo any ex-post
1 There are currently the other two grant programs assisting the ten CEE candidate countries: Phare and
Sapard. Sapard deals with the modernization of agriculture and rural development and does not concern us
here. For details on the Phare program, see section 8.2.2 below.