ABSTRACT
At least superficially, events in the trunk roads sector in the 1990s carried many echoes of what had occurred in the 1970s. Initially, this gave the appearance of a policy cycle, with first one adversarial community and then the other holding the upper hand. Thus after environmental ideas had effectively transplanted themselves into the policy sector in the 1970s, in the 1980s road building once more became the primary transport policy ‘solution’. This culminated in the 1989 White Paper Roads for Prosperity, which effectively revived the concept of a strategic trunk roads plan, and envisaged a doubling of expenditure. In the early 1990s, therefore, the roads community had reasserted its hegemonic quality, and the task confronting the environmental community was as daunting as that faced by a previous generation two decades earlier. In fact, the challenge was to be even greater in that there were to be no extreme public expenditure or oil price crises of the type seen in the 1970s to provide a window of opportunity (see Doherty 1999). In response, however, the environmental community conducted an intense multi-arena campaign. There were echoes of the 1970s in that there were two chief facets to this activity. First, there were a series of direct action
protests which attracted a high degree of media attention (but this time with the construction sites rather than the public inquiries as an effective ‘arena without rules’). Second, alternative sources of expertise challenged the knowledge and authority of the roads community.
