Multi-Politics and Its Effects on Governance of Sustainable Transport Planning in Belgrade

• In Event: Ontologies of Environmental Governance - I

Abstract

In this paper, I explore environmental governance of transport planning in Belgrade, Serbia. Through EU accession proceedings, Serbia is reforming its environmental legislative apparatus and introducing new governance tools for steering planning in a more sustainable direction. I study how traffic engineers, architects, and other professional, who are working in this changing transport-planning arena, try to establish professionally satisfactory epistemic authority with a particular ontological politics. Through document analysis and interviews (N=25) with various actors involved in transport planning in Belgrade, I find that competing ontological politics, most prominently from various political actors and new EU regulations, continually disrupt and destabilize the epistemic living space of transport planners. Shifting actors, politics and policies create a conflictual space for environmental governance. I introduce a multi-political model that helps capture heterogeneous and multiple political ontologies and how they effect design of sustainable urban technologies. In the end, I argue how attention and care for the process of sustainable transformations can help wield together these various actor worlds.

Author

• Ivana Suboticki, Norwegian University of Science and Technology