Government increasingly faces ‘wicked’ policy controversies, be it economic recession, urban renewal or welfare reform. These issues generate persistent conflicts, which are fuelled not simply by rival claims to expertise, but also by incompatible values and rival representations of the very policy problem to be addressed. With this in mind, government, it is widely suggested, should facilitate new forms of stakeholder deliberation and interactions through which competing values can be challenged or transformed and new policy settlements emerge. Yet, how is government to forge the conditions for such transformative interaction? How is it to avoid in the process hardening conflicts and boundaries across policy arenas?
Addressing these questions, this paper examines the politics of attempts at citizen engagement in aviation. Air travel has in recent years been transformed into a ‘wicked issue’, which has seen its promise for economic growth increasingly connected to the threat of climate change and peak oil. Airport expansion has triggered widespread political opposition and new forms of citizen mobilisation. Against this background, we examine how governments have sought to resolve the tensions and conflicts posed by demands for a policy of sustainable aviation. Undertaking a comparative analysis across different countries and different episodes of public consultation and engagement, including on-going struggles at Nantes, Heathrow, Luton and Berlin, we set out a typology of different forms of public consultation in relation to airport expansion. In so doing, we analyse the strategies and tactics of citizens across these different spaces or arenas, critically evaluating the successes and failures of governments in forging new political settlements in aviation policy. We conclude by considering how we might envisage new democratic forms of interactive governance that offer alternative ways of addressing the ‘messy’ politics of intractable policy controversies.
