The airport assembled. Rethinking planning and policy making of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol by using the Actor-Network theory

Abstract

Due to its ambiguous multi-actor character, the decision making process concerning complex governance systems, such as Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AAS), is experienced as being incremental and highly indecisive. That is why in these cases collaborative arrangements of involved stakeholders are often created to give advice on how to tackle these complex problems. This thesis analyses the most recent arrangement concerning Schiphol in that perspective: the Alders Table, a commission consisting of members from the public sector, the private sector and civil society that, from 2006 onwards, has been formulating recommendations concerning the future capacity of Schiphol. This consultative body has been praised for apparently presenting a unanimously supported advice and breaking free from the seemingly widely recognized impasse in the decision-making process concerning the development of Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. By using the Actor-Network theory, which enables readers to understand how actors construct ‘facts’ and ‘realities’ by forming networks of relations departing from socio-technical controversies, it is shown that the Alders-Table is in fact hardly successful at all, nor reducing or resolving the complexity of the governance system. It even results in newer, more intricate and sharper controversies. The way planning and policy-making around Schiphol is organized nowadays, through consultative bodies such as the Alders Table, hampers the decision-making process because of an arbitrarily short-circuited, technocratic and dominant focus on noise, hindrance and restrictions. Furthermore, normative and cognitive disagreements about the exact composition of technologies and science used within the Schiphol file ensure that consultative bodies concerning Schiphol are destined to fail in finding durable and resilient solutions. Without departing from socio-technical controversies, planners and policy makers will never grasp why social, political and moral uncertainties are rendered more complex, rather than less, by scientific knowledge or established technologies as is the case with Schiphol. Therefore, planning and policy making should become increasingly relational and actor-oriented, rather than setting contextual and geographical conditions: What is important is the constant awareness of locations as nodes within networks of associations. Such an approach creates tailor-made solutions on a relatively small scale, without losing track of the network of associations in which the space and practice are involved, by introducing a plan of transcendence and a plan of immanence. The plan of transcendence sets the framework by which planners and policy makers must operate. At the same time, the plan of immanence intents to divert contemporary planning and governance away from the beaten track and to engage planning practitioners to design and tailor their own planning processes congruent with the ever-changing dynamics of the multiplicity of relational webs that transect space and time. In this way, a more top down approach is used in order to set the framework of transcendence while an actor-relation approach is used bottom up to form plans of immanence. The given facts within the framework of transcendence set the boundaries for tailor made plans of immanence, go beyond hegemonic ideas and established solutions, and bridge the gap between existing and normatively valued situations of Schiphol.