Infrastructure Policy. Environmental Problems as Drivers of Modernisation

Abstract

Infrastructure systems like energy supply, water supply or waste management enable our modern society by acting as interfaces between environment and technosphere. They are planned for decades, are extremely capital intensive and thus quite resistant towards innovation policies. Infrastructure theory focuses on a variety of societal, institutional, and technical factors in order to explain this systemness or inertia of Infrastructure systems. But with the change of environmental challenges – from local problems towards global sustainability issues like climate change or resource scarcities – the stability of infrastructure regimes is undermined by such external developments. Environmental protection implemented in regulations covering a wide range of action fields and widely institutionalised, but at the same time subject to ongoing change, therefore continuously stresses infrastructures to adapt in order to support ecological claims of the society. In recent years socio-technical innovation theories extensively explained changes in infrastructure systems by taking a global perspective, but we miss studies with a “specialised” focus on the link between the development of infrastructures and environmental policies. Some of the following questions are discussed: - What kind of changes or innovations are caused in infrastructure systems by environmental policies/ problems? - With which aims, claims and principles of environmental policy are the different infrastructure systems confronted with? - Which are the main challenges for the adaption of the infrastructure system, driven by environmental policies? Which challenges are already overcome, which ones are still pending? - What role do state actors (as often being the main promoters for environmental protection aims) in development of infrastructure systems play? Where are limitations for national environmental policies? - What role do private actors play? Which different modes of governance can be observed?

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