A "giant furrow" or a "way to economic prosperity"? A conflict in the meaning of environmental sustainability - the case of Rail Baltica mega-project
Abstract: This thesis examines the conflict situation that has emerged around the environmental discourse in the planning process of a railway mega-project in Estonia. A discourse analysis is carried out on policy documents, publications, and interviews following Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory and methodological guidelines, to examine the ways that the concept of sustainability conflicts between stakeholders. The politics of scale theoretical framework is used to examine the stakeholders’ spatial thinking inherent to environmental sustainability concept. The results show that in the case of Rail Baltica mega-project, on the one side, the developers construct the meaning of environmental sustainability on a large EU-scale and argue for a new direct railway, while on the other side, the citizens depart on a local scale as they frame environmental sustainability to follow the local context and argue for the reconstruction of an existing railway. This shows that the stakeholders frame the environmental sustainability on a particular scale to fix specific spatial thinking in environmental discourse, and thus, legitimise particular spatial changes, and hierarchisation of scales in the planning process. Therefore, the sustainability discourse in mega-project development entails a specific scalar understanding, which is highly struggled over and serves a political function.
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