PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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influence of the EU in the candidate countries is even greater than in its member states,
since the candidate countries should be eager to fulfill all necessary requirements for
future membership. However, as we will see, national politics also strongly influence
transport decision-making in the candidate countries, especially when it comes to
strategic and geo-politically important routes and/or large-scale investments.
Taken together, the Decisional-Power and the Multi-Locational Politics
Propositions are particularly helpful for understanding the dynamics of the sub-case
studies presented in Chapters 7 and 8. Chapter 7 focuses on the gestation and
formulation of the EU’s Pan-European Transport Network plans and programs, focusing
on revealing the underlying rationales, key decision makers, and outcomes of the socalled
Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) exercise for the Central
Eastern European candidate countries. Chapter 8 presents a review of the first two years
of transport-related funding for Poland and Hungary under the EU’s new Instrument for
Structural Pre-Accession (ISPA).
Finally, I introduce one last proposition which explicitly accounts for the fact that,
once they are fully implemented, EU transport infrastructure decisions of course also
have an impact on transport and land-use patterns at the local/regional level. So
depending on the details of the related planning and implementation processes and the
observable spatial consequences of the respective infrastructures, EU transport-sector
decision-making can thus be interpreted as being more or less “sustainable”. Note that
such value judgments about the local and regional sustainability effects of EU-funded
infrastructures should of course be based on the EU’s own definitions of transport and