ABSTRACT
Already well before Manuel Castells’ (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, “networks” had become an important new buzzword concept in planning and public policy-making. Broadly speaking, scholars associate it with the move from more hierarchical political and societal structures firmly rooted in the idea of the sovereign nation-state to a world where decisions at the local, regional, national, and global level all involve an increasing multitude of both governmental and non-governmental actors. This move toward multi-level governance has been particularly dramatic in Western Europe, where the establishment and progressive institutionalization of the European Union as a new form of both government and governance has brought about important shifts in policy-making structures (Marks et al. 1996; Bache 1998; Hix 1998; Peterson and Bomberg 1999; Scharpf 1999; Wallace and Wallace 2000). This chapter uses the development of trans-national high-speed rail infrastructures in Western Europe in the 1990s as a case study to investigate which kinds of governance “networks” were, and still are, responsible for embarking on such a vast international infrastructure program. This study questions the often only implicitly made yet wide-spread assumption that a move from hierarchical structures to “networks” necessarily implies a move toward more democratic and transparent decision-making structures. Rather, the evidence supports instead Benz and Papadopoulos’s (2003: 2) conclusion that “networks are necessarily exclusive – i.e., they consist of interactions among limited groups of actors. They
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equality and inclusiveness.”
