PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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information, and evasion of public accountability forms part of the story my research
intends to tell.
1.9.2 Interviews
The list of potential interviewees developed naturally out of the initial process of
identifying the relevant stakeholders.
Most key institutions, organizations and
individuals in European transport infrastructure decision-making are listed in the
glossary. Many of my choices for interviews at the European Union were selfexplanatory
in the sense that they could be picked directly from the organigram of the
relevant EU bureaucracies. After an initial set of interviews, a reputational (“snowball”)
method was used to identify the most relevant future interview partners, i.e. past
interviewees were asked to provide names of other persons that they thought were
particularly knowledgeable in the suggested areas of inquiry. In the end, the ultimate
selection of interviewees was purposive in the sense that I relied on my own good
judgment to define the final list of interview partners. However, it should also be noted
that my own long-standing professional experience in the area of sustainable transport
advocacy provided me with substantial advance knowledge of the key players.
All interviews, including all the longer, specifically arranged talks at the EU in
Brussels, and at various ministries and offices in Warsaw and Budapest, were conducted
as open-ended, unstructured interviews. I always had a set of more general policy
questions as well as some specific informational questions for the interviewees, but there
was no fixed list of questions. This was largely due to the complexity of the issues
involved and due to the fact that different interview partners provided information about