The Political Relevance of Planners’ Analysis: The Case of a Parliamentary Standing Committee

Abstract

The article examines and confirms the hypothesis that political decision makers gather information and do not use it; ask for more information and ignore it; make decisions first and look for relevant information afterwards; and, collect and process a great deal of information that has little or no direct relevance to decisions. The results are based on interviews with members of the Norwegian national assembly’s Standing Committee on Transport and Communications. In three parliamentary periods, members were interviewed about their use of results from analytic planning models evaluating the projects and strategies of three consecutive road and transport plans. It is studied how the attitudes of the politicians towards the analytic results change as the planners supply increasingly advanced means-ends models.

Response to Van Wee and Boarnet

“…(In addition to their quoted study by Börjesson & Eliasson, see also Sager & Ravlum 2005). I also agree in their argument that, even if exact quantifications of residential effects were possible, several other important uncertainties remain, such as estimates of the costs of policies, or the valuation of several effects.…”

Application of System Dynamics to Evaluate the Social and Economic Benefits of Infrastructure Projects

“…Regarding the macro-micro economy, Mohring [23] considers CBA in the contexts of a closed and open economy. Furthermore, scholars then focused on specific aspects of transport infrastructure projects such as using cost-benefit ratios to rank road project priorities [24], the relationship between political attitudes and changes in analytic results [25], and the influences of CBA results on investment decisions [26,27]. Although CBA has brought many benefits to policy-decision makers, the Transit Co-operative Research Program found that there are major limitations related to the use of CBA in evaluating project impacts on the local community [28].…”

Making land use – Transport models operational tools for planning: From a top-down to an end-user approach

“…The fundamental goal is to adjust the models to their role in the policy making process, as underlined by Vickerman (2008). Indeed, both PSS literature (Gudmundsson, 2011;Brommelstroet and Bertolini, 2008;Klosterman 2001) and science-policy interface literature (Sager and Ravlum, 2005;Vechionne, 2012) reveal the complexity of the link between modeling tools and decision-making process. As stated by Nilsson et al (2008, p. 3), "more than three decades of policy analytic research remind us that the inter-relationship between assessment tools, the evidence they reveal, and their use by policy makers is unlikely to be straightforward".…”