PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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challenging and re-evaluating planned investments from an integrated perspective (also
see below).
Overall, the decision-making processes surrounding EU transport infrastructure
investments in the context of enlargement exhibit one recurring, contradictory tendency.
This contradictory tendency, which I term the “contextual discourse” dilemma of
contemporary planning and policy-making, has particular relevance for decision-making
in contexts of multi-location politics as is the case with the European Union. This
dilemma, which I consider the central analytical insight of my study, can be summarized
as follows:
On one hand, it is true that successful planning and policy-making is dependent
on developing universally applicable, integrative guiding visions and storylines such as
“sustainability” or “cohesion” to guide and legitimize decision-making. On the other
hand, it is also true that such discursive concepts only become useful policy tools for
decision-makers if they can be operationalized into concrete local/regional agendas
resulting in specific investment choices in particular locales. In other words: in
contemporary settings of global-regional interdependence, networked economies and
multi-location politics, planners and policy-makers are increasingly challenged to justify
their actions via the development of investment and decision-making rationales that
might be simultaneously applicable both at the abstract-universal and at the concretelocal
level. Yet the more grounded planning and policy-making discourses become in
concrete local-regional contexts, the less universally applicable and the more conflictual
and contradictory they become. Conversely, general discourses devoid of any
applicability to local contexts are unlikely to gain widespread support.