Designing sustainable transportation policy for acceptance: a comparison of Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

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Designing sustainable transportation policy for acceptance: a comparison of Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.

Abstract

Almost everybody would welcome at least in a general sense--a transportation policy designed in accordance with the principle of sustainability. But there appears to be insufficient support for moving toward sustainability in transportation policy. The main question this article poses is therefore: How can the acceptance of sustainable transportation policy be improved? We investigate this question using three clusters of measures: transportation management in agglomerations, infrastructure financing for large-scale projects, and combined freight transportation. A comparison of the three clusters in Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland shows mixed results: The acceptance of regulatory measures depends more on political-administrative traditions in each country than on the particular policy instrument. Measures designed in a comprehensive manner are not necessarily less accepted, as we had theoretically assumed. On the other hand, our theoretical assumptions regarding the time perspective of the measures were largely confirmed. The main challenge for the acceptance of a sustainable policy is to reconcile specific short-term measures with a long-term sustainable strategy.

Introduction

The concept of sustainability tries to integrate an overarching, long-term perspective on environmental, economic and social development. Policies designed to bring about sustainable development are therefore often inevitably in conflict with the short-term interests of political actors and with the agendas of specific interest groups. This makes acceptance of such a concept in the political process more difficult.

Transportation policy, with its various links to the environment, spatial planning, economics, and society, as well as its increasing internationalization, is particularly acutely confronted with this problem. We argue it would be more accurate to see sustainable transportation policy not as a cluster of more or less environment-, economics- and society-friendly political measures, but rather as an interface of different policy problems, political approaches to problem solving, and various mostly legitimate--interests of diverse political actors. Policy makers and scientists should pay as much attention to the quality of process-oriented as they do to policy-oriented measures (see Widmer et al., 2000: p. 14).

How can the acceptance of sustainable transportation policy then be improved? To answer this question, it does not fulfil the requirements of the concepts of acceptance nor of sustainability to take only the policy outcome and its acceptance (e.g. in public votes or opinion polls) into consideration. Instead, we have to turn our attention to the design of the policy process and consequently to the involvement of different political actors in the individual phases of policy-formulation, decision-making and implementation, as well as to the implementation strategies and the policy design in procedural matters.

Thus, we understand the acceptance of political measures by target groups and the public not as a given value but as a variable, open to the influences of communication instruments and learning processes over a longer term. The acceptance and implementation of rules for process and discourse is therefore often more important than the acceptance of the particular design of the political measure itself. From this point of view, the design of the political process is a concept that overlaps that of the policy, in this case a sustainable transportation policy. In our theoretical considerations we therefore add the quality of the political process as a fourth dimension to the three pillars of sustainability. Our assumptions are consiste...

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