Making Believe: Institutional and Discursive Barriers to Sustainable Transport in Two Australian Cities

Abstract

The main focus of this paper is the complex of 'storylines' justifying transport infrastructure policy. We use the term 'discourse network' to describe the specific set of storylines and arguments that coordinate action in a particular policy domain. The 'knots' in the network are the related discursive threads of argument, the 'nodes' are institutional structures binding people together, sometimes in particular places, for close communication. Our empirical frame compares the transport policy domains of Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, in the past four decades. We find that transport storylines in both cities--whilst hardly conducive to sustainability--have by no means constituted a unified ideology. The evidence is that discourse networks in both contexts have been loosely woven nets comprised of strands of part truth, part fiction and quasi-arguments generated from different professional sources with different and in some ways conflicting ideologies. There are significant variations in the knots of storylines found in Sydney and Melbourne, particularly as they confront the opposing discourse of sustainability.

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