Stakeholders and future generations

187 An important part of this thesis takes further the notion of stakeholder involvement in STA (articles II and III particularly). In this section, I cover some of the theoretical background to this and how stakeholder

involvement can be an improvement to conventional, 1^st generation assessment tools. I also explore further the potential and limitations for considering future generations as stakeholders.

188 Complexity theory suggests two complementary avenues for dealing with complex topics such as planning for sustainable development: providing multiple perspectives, and doing so by engaging with stakeholders in a process of reflexive learning. Since the 90s, we are witnessing a turn in planning from classic instrumental rationality towards a postmodern ‘Habermassian’ communicative rationality (Sanderson 2001; Allmendinger 2009:Chap.8&9). The key intention of this planning approach is to enable a type of democratic renewal by enhancing deliberative capacity through new forms of participation, collaboration and learning. This approach represents a shift from traditional and technocratic ‘governing’ by a formal institutional authority to a more inclusive ‘governance’ that involves a wider range of stakeholders in policy development and delivery⁵⁷. Governance is fundamentally motivated by “the increasingly complex, dynamic and

interdependent nature of contemporary policy-making” (Lange et al. 2013:p406).

189 This open approach to planning would seem particularly well adapted to the challenge of steering a transition towards sustainability, which is normative (dealing with issues of fairness within and between generations), systemic (involving interactions between human and natural systems) and complex (long-term, spatially widespread and ultimately uncertain with no clear right or wrong)(Lange et al. 2013). Building institutional

57 Communicative rationality in transport governance should not only be understood as just ‘more public participation’

however (Willson 2001). It represents a wider shift towards a social-constructionist view of putting language and meaning associated to language (i.e. dicourses) at the core of the planning process.

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capacity for collaborative planning has been an evolving topic for both urban planning (Healey 1998) and transport planning (Willson 2001).

190 In many respects, the reflections started in the previous section depart from the rational-positivist view of indicators as instrumental and neutral tools to inform policy-making. A constructivist view turns this on its head, where “indicators are seen as dynamic sites of conflict and co-operation between policy actors (..), they are perceived as a means by which actors seek to exercise power, retain status and strive towards policy goals” (Astleithner et al. 2004). We are not far here from the actor-network theory perspective where

indicators themselves become powerful ‘actors’ (Lehtonen, Sébastien, and Bauler 2016)⁵⁸.

191 Knowledge utilisation in STA is too broad a topic to give it fully justice here. Yet for the specific case of indicators, Cash et al. suggest to look beyond credibility and salience, and into legitimacy. Legitimacy is specifically concerned with representative participation and with the choices made on how information is produced and disseminated (2002). Furthermore, increasing legitimacy by increasing inclusiveness of

various stakeholders and different knowledges can both influence credibility and salience, albeit positively or negatively (ibid.). According to Turnhout et al., the inclusion of various stakeholder perspectives can

contribute positively to both the quality of indicators and to their acceptance (2007).

192 I was particularly motivated by these conclusions in article III, where we experiment with variants of multi-criteria analysis (MCA) tools that make explicit both the contribution of various stakeholders in evaluating impacts of transport (i.e. therefore addressing the credibility of the assessments) and the choice of relevant impacts (i.e. therefore addressing the salience of the assessment).

2.4.1 Limitations of communicative planning

193 These considerations however raise two interrelated potential problems. First, the participatory approach does suggest including non-scientists and lay-people in reviewing the choice and the quality of indicators on the grounds that, in the face of sustainability being complex and uncertain, experts too are ‘amateurs’

(Turnhout, Hisschemöller, and Eijsackers 2007, citing Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1992). But couldn’t this approach risk giving undue weight to personal viewpoints with doubtful credibility? Surely there remains a role and purpose for scientific rationality to avoid pure subjectivity.

194 In communicative planning theory, Habermas’ intention is to “bridge and integrate science and ethics in an open, process-oriented model that supports a democratic social order” and therefore suggests a number of criteria for assessing scientific credibility – or rather, ‘valid communication’ - such as clarity and accuracy of the statements made and the legitimacy and sincerity of the speaker (Willson 2001:p11; Allmendinger 2009:p203). I leave to others the tasks of drawing the line between objectivism and relativism in

postmodernity, or to determine whether such a line even exists. I shall just say that in the case of STA, this commitment to transparency and inclusiveness has the potential to increase both the accountability of

58 Lehtonen et al. here do not explicitly refer to actor-network theory (ANT), although they suggest in their conclusion that indicators are potentially powerful actors in their own right. This is similar to ANT’s concept of ‘actants’ which include both human actors and non-human artefacts, and assumes all actants to have agency in the network they are a part of.

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decisions and the possibility for ‘opening up’ transport planning to challenge not only the solutions proposed but also the assumptions and the underlying needs being addressed⁵⁹.

195 Secondly, another caveat of participatory methods for sustainability indicator development and STA in general is the simple question: can more stakeholder involvement actually deliver more sustainability? A recent contribution by Lehtonen et al. voices similar concerns: “As demonstrated for instance by scholars in urban studies, sociology, geography and urban planning, even participatory indicator exercises cannot guarantee that indicators foster socially desirable objectives” (Lehtonen, Sébastien, and Bauler 2016:p5).

196 In their treatise on the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann (1966) bring the point home that despite the power of language to transcend the ‘here and now’, our daily experience of reality as human beings is primarily a matter of spatial and temporal proximity. That stakeholders are undoubtedly more familiar with the context of their immediate physical surroundings makes a strong case for their involvement in decision-making. Although including wider perspectives creates difficulties with managing and

aggregating the complexity of the resulting input (as was seen with the 50,000 or so pages produced as part of the assessment and consultation process of HS2), it is quite understandable how local knowledge obtained from such democratic approach brings potential for more acceptable solutions in the longer run (Bracken, Bulkeley, and Whitman 2014). Yet the question becomes: who should we then involve for getting a perspective from the future?

197 From the original technical challenges of indicator design and selection, this question about the

operationalisation of the future generations’ perspective in sustainable transport assessment has therefore become a main focal point in my research. This was done first in article II where I propose a simple re-weighting of impacts based on a strong conceptualisation of the three dimensions of sustainability, and later in article III where I complement this virtual sustainability perspective by a sustainable transport stakeholder formed by researchers in this specific field. The main assumption used here is that in lack of comprehensive and credible quantitative data from the positivist approach, the best instrument we have to deal with

complexity is perhaps human judgment (at least so far). Stakeholders – in our case, sustainable transport

‘experts’ - were asked to assess, to the best of their knowledge, the various transport options from the perspective of a sustainability advocate. A well-developed methodology for capturing these judgments is then used to quantify and aggregate this perspective in a comparable form with other stakeholders (namely government and conventional transport planners).

198 The research for article III also provided insight in the role of scientists in communicative planning. Rather than meeting the instrumental rationality expectation of providing an objective and measurable truth, our role was to insure methodological clarity and quality – for example, by insuring a comprehensive and well-described list of (mostly) non-overlapping impacts based on stakeholders input. In other words, I became a researcher-facilitator.

2.4.2 Impossible sustainability?

199 From these reflections, it is tempting to conclude that the problem of integrating principles of sustainability into STA remains entire, and that the modernist approach to transport planning, even if augmented with participatory processes, offers a depressing picture for any such integration in the near future. The objectivist

59 As an example of this, throughout my research on HS2 I found this last aspect of early and influential stakeholder involvement to be particularly lacking, despite the rather long and extensive consultation process that took place.

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paradigm in instrumental rationality can be questioned for not quite being able to represent adequately the complex phenomenon of sustainability, or for being prone to represent only what is of interest to those involved in the production of knowledge. Yet the explicit inclusion of wider – and supposedly wiser – groups of stakeholders is no guarantee that the interest of future generations be taken into account, let alone that a solution leading to an improvement in sustainability be selected.

200 The process of indicator development may very well serve the important purpose of stakeholder education, but Becker raises the risk “that ultimately little will be accomplished beyond this if those involved do not understand the fundamental ends of sustainable development and the means with which to implement them”

(2007:p138). Holden et al. depart from the common wisdom that local stakeholder participation is key to achieving sustainable development: “we disagree with the proposition that the choice of sustainable dimensions, indicators and threshold values should depend on what local stakeholders agree to include”

(2013:p69). Instead they argue for the need for a global consensus – for which they refer to the Brundtland report. I reach the same conclusion from my research so far.

201 Overall, I do not think it is necessary to give in to complexity, absolute relativism or ‘impossible sustainability’ for two reasons. The first is that the science of sustainability such as The Natural Step principles and the Planetary Boundaries concept posit some fundamental physical requirements for human life to continue to flourish. From this I reuse the words of Shove and Walker (2007) and conclude that “it is perhaps possible to imagine some shared, technically determined specification of environmentally ‘benign’”.

Therefore some form of indicators, however reductionist, incomplete or biased, are likely to continue being useful as communicative tools in STA processes set to retain such characteristics.

202 The second reason for ‘optimism’ is that the future depends on the decisions made. Assuming a future sustainable transport scenario for humanity exists, there is a need to develop further decision-support

processes and assessment tools in STA that supports a process of transition towards such vision (whether the concepts and tools introduced in the articles composing this thesis will serve as a stepping stone remains to be seen).

203 Considering transport projects have clear implications for humans in the future, it would seem ‘fair’ (from a Rawlsian perspective) that current generations ‘put themselves in their shoes’ when taking important decisions. This suggests extending the concept of democracy to explicitly account for future generations’

interests and develop decision-support processes and assessment tools that incorporate those interests.

Interestingly, this conclusion just recently appeared in the report by Oxford’s Future of Humanity on global catastrophic risks (Cotton-Barratt et al. 2016).

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