PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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order to fully explain such systematic biases, one needs to focus not only on the rhetorical
content of official definitions but also on the underlying rationales of EU transport sector
decision-making.
The main proposition for the next three chapters is the “Dominant Discourse”
Proposition. This proposition assumes that the EU employs the concept of sustainable
transport in the context of a discursive framework which favors (short and medium term)
growth and efficiency objectives at the expense of equity and environmental preservation
objectives. More precisely, I argue that EU transport sector decision-making is
dominated by the discursive framework of ecological modernization. I define ecological
modernization as a modernist model of development that is relatively successful in
integrating a variety of environmental and social concerns into its framework, but that
nevertheless privileges competitiveness and economic growth over alternative
development goals.
My ensuing interpretations of decision-making in the European Union heavily
rely on the fundamental insight that decision-making rationalities are always expressed
through discursive processes.
Maarten Hajer (1995:44) has defined the term
(environmental) discourse as “a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts, and categorizations
that are produced, reproduced, and transformed in a particular set of practices and
through which meaning is given to physical and social realities”. 1
This has since become
1 A few pages later, Hajer (1995:60) introduces three further definitions with regard to discourse worth
noting:
We will speak of discourse structuration if the credibility of actors in a given domain requires them to
draw on the ideas, concepts, and categories of a given discourse, for instance, if actors’ credibility
depends on the usage of the terms of ecological modernization in the domain of environmental politics.
We will speak of discourse institutionalization if a given discourse is translated into institutional
arrangements, i.e. if the theoretical concepts of ecological modernization are translated into concrete
politices (i.e. shifting investment in mobility from road to rail) and institutional arrangements. … If