Introduction Part Four: Infrastructure: The Road to Eternity?

Abstract

The following three chapters examine questions of participation raised by infrastructure projects, taking for study diverse examples from the fields of waste and transport policy. Such projects are frequently controversial for policy-makers and the public who pay and vote for them. This is firstly because various policy rationales may conflict with each other. For example, high-speed rail may indeed be better for the environment than new motorways but is it really sustainable to travel so fast and far if it is based on nuclear sourced electricity? Secondly, infrastructure policies are intrusive in physical terms, as they will demand considerable intervention in the natural environment and they are nearly always doomed to be on somebody else’s ‘backyard’.