PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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In Chapter 9, I looked at the M0 ring road around Budapest as an interesting case
study example of a key infrastructure node with important, partially interlocking local,
regional, national and international transport functions. I applied my typology of
discursive frameworks for “sustainable” transport policy decision-making to a concrete
case study and compared how the overarching themes, key concepts and policy proposals
of the five different discursive frameworks were reflected in the local controversies over
a large-scale infrastructure. The M0 case showed that concerns such as public
accountability, participatory democracy, mediation of locational conflict, and
environmental preservation tended to disappear from view once the Realrationalität of
ecological modernization set in. Additionally, the M0 case also demonstrated a key
difference between the EU’s (and the local Hungarian government’s) main eco-modernist
discourse and its closest alternative, namely the more moderate reflexive modernization
discourse: at minimum, the latter keeps the promise of the “precautionary principle”
alive. Proponents of the reflexive approach would therefore advocate a more
comprehensive, future-oriented risk assessment of all aspects of large-scale
infrastructures, including the problematic, and difficult to asses, regional land use and
mobility impacts.
In the end, the ring road chapter validated the “Local Impacts” proposition, which
assumed that the types of “ecological modernization” investment rationales favored by
the EU would tend to underestimate the negative local impacts of large-scale
infrastructures. The chapter also showed how each of the four alternative discursive
frameworks added an important dimension to the overall problem. Interestingly, not all
of them can be easily adequately addressed within the current decision-making system.