PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

28
decision-makers. But when focusing on the operationalization of the concept of
sustainability within EU decision-making, and its operationalization into actual
guidelines for transport investment decisions in particular, we also have to consider
alternative concepts that might be competing with it. So the second key insight guiding
my discussion of EU “rhetoric” in Part II is that sustainability is but one of several
overarching EU development goals, and that implementation-oriented discourses also aim
at achieving goals other than sustainability. I therefore make the following, additional
proposition with regard to transport-related EU decision-making:
1.8.3 The Conflicting Storylines Proposition
3) Decision-making for Pan-European transport infrastructure investments lacks
consistence and sustainability due to the existence of several, partially complementary,
but also partially competing EU development objectives. These objectives are in turn
expressed through several, partially conflicting guiding visions (‘Leitbilder’) and
storylines.
This key proposition already increasingly shifts our attention away from policy
discourses (“rhetoric”) towards actual investment rationales (“reality”). In Chapter 6, I
use the German notion of Leitbilder to identify and summarize the three overarching EU
“guiding visions” of integration, enlargement and sustainability. I subsequently adapt
Maarten Hajer’s concept of storylines to distinguish four spatial storylines for EU
transport infrastructure investments: “cohesion,” “polycentricity,” “missing links,” and
“bottlenecks.”
Armed with these insights into overall discourses of EU transport-related policies
and programs, I then finally enter the “realities” part of the study. Here, while conscious
of the fact that the two are intimately intertwined (through the concept of