Introduction: the stakes of transport policy in social science research.
| Verfasser | Sager, Fritz |
Introduction
In a mobile world, transport affects nearly everyone. Accordingly, transport policy tends to be a rather contended field in politics at all levels, from small neighbourhoods up to the European Union. The reasons for conflicting opinions include questions of sustainability (air pollution), governance (privatisation, separation of infrastructure and services), as well as development of new infrastructures (urban public transport, motorways, airports) and social inequalities (access). Still, while vast amounts of research on transport issues have been conducted not only by engineers, planners and economists, but also by social scientists such as sociologists and human geographers, transport policy surprisingly enough does not appear so far to have been of fundamental interest to political scientists in the field of policy research.
The situation is in fact quite paradoxical. Authors as varied as Manuel Castells (1996), John Urry (2000) and Francois Ascher (2000) insist that the nature of mobility in Western societies is increasingly central. Each in his own way shows how this trend is being accompanied by the considerable development of speed potentials made possible by transportation systems that allow users to appropriate space--systems which in the eyes of certain analysts like Zygmunt Bauman (2000) constitute powerful vectors of social change. Despite the importance of this field, public action in the area of transportation--which is the direct source of the development of the above-mentioned speed potentials--receives a paltry share of attention from social science researchers in spite of recurrent and heated debates.
Overview and guiding question of this volume
This is the context in which this special edition of German Policy Studies aims at answering a simple question, namely the question of what is the gain of policy research for the specific needs of the field of transport policy. In this volume, we would like to cover a variety of themes on two aspects that are of interest from a policy analysis point of view, i.e. the different levels of public action on the one hand, and the different stages of the policy cycle on the other.
* First, not only the policy problems at stake, but also the politics needed to resolve them differ remarkably at the local, national and supranational levels. Thus, the contributions analyse transport policy issues at three of these levels.
* Second, the policy-making process as well as the policy implementation is relevant in terms of a practice-oriented policy analysis. The same is true for the effects of a certain policy design or a changing institutional setting. We therefore shall avoid limiting ourselves to only one perspective.
This special edition of German Policy Studies brings together five original...
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