Michael Dooms
Department of Business Economics and Strategic Management, Brussels, Belgium, Cathy Macharis, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Department of Business Economics and Strategic Management, Brussels, Belgium
Introducing the concept of stakeholders in the evaluations of transport infrastructure projects - The DHL-case at Brussels National Airport (assigned to theme
Large-scale infrastructure development and/or extension of important multimodal nodes in the transport chain (e.g. seaports and airports) are increasingly hampered by environmental and ecological constraints and regulations on a local level. Although the wider social and economic impacts can be proven very significant on the regional and even national level, there seems to be a growing concern about taking into account the diverging objectives of all the stakeholders involved, in order to enhance local acceptance of these development and extension projects. As a matter of fact, several partial studies can be executed (Economic Effect Analysis, Environmental Effect Analysis, Social Cost-Benefit-Analysis, etc.), but in most cases these partial studies do not reveal explicitly the long-term dynamic relations between the stakeholders, which the ultimate decision makers (in most cases regional government) have to consider when taking the decisions about the delivery of the environmental and building permits and the creation of a stable, long-term regulatory framework. In this paper, a multi-criteria, multi-actor analysis method is proposed to integrate these long-term dynamic relations in the decision process. This approach will be applied to the extension plan of DHL at Brussels National Airport, which was a project with important long-term local and regional impacts (social and economic as well as ecological impacts). The paper shows how the introduction of stakeholders in all stages of the analysis, provides all stakeholders (including the regional policy makers) with complementary and valuable knowledge, in order to take an acceptable decision on the broad societal level.
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(copyright Gunther Maier) |