The Politics of Airport Expansion

Abstract

This panel investigates how best to understand the politics of airport governance. There are increasing protests and campaigns against the expansion of airports across Europe. Dominant 'predict and provide' models driven by the belief in 'the freedom to fly' and the economic value of the air transport industry have come under challenge from emerging coalitions of local residents, environmental and conservation lobbies, and direct action campaigners under the banner of 'demand management'. As such, airports have become sites of political contestation where competing logics and dynamics collide, and new patterns of politics emerge as local residents seek to construct different alliances and work across different institutional venues and different participative policy forums. Indeed, much of this campaigning has taken place against the background of the repeated ‘failure’ of local residents to place what they deem to be effective limits on the continued growth of airports and air traffic. This changing politics of airport governance raises a range of fundamental empirical, methodological and theoretical debates in policy analysis as to how airport protests and political campaigns in general are constructed and managed. Are particular patterns of campaigning emerging in protests against airport expansion? How are networks being constructed and managed by actors in the field of airport governance? And, more generally, how and in what precise forms do groups and movements reproduce themselves over time and across different policy arenas against a background of uncertainty and instability? In what ways and why do groups or social movements react to the (perceived) failures of their responses? The workshop invites papers that address these questions or other relevant issues related to the study of the politics of airport governance. We welcome theoretically-informed empirical papers that investigate the assumptions of the dominant instrumental and expressive theoretical models that have been employed to explain the mobilization and strategies of groups and movements in the policy process, particularly those that include considerations of the potential democratic implications of the protests and campaigns against airport expansion.

Title	Details
Soft Steering in a Hard Case: Extending Frankfurt Airport with a Mediation Process	View Paper Details
Private troubles, public issues. Complaints, protest, opportunities and the discursive construction of aircraft noise annoyance	View Paper Details
Constructing Protest: The Campaign Against The Expansion of Stansted Airport	View Paper Details