Transport Policy Paradigms at the Local Level: The Norwich Inner Ring Road
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| Author | Andrew Grantham,John Greenaway |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9299.00232 |
TRANSPORT POLICY PARADIGMS AT THE
LOCAL LEVEL: THE NORWICH INNER RING
ROAD
JOHN GREENAWAY AND ANDREW GRANTHAM
It has been claimed that transport policy in the UK, once a quiescent area, has been
opened to battle between competing advocacy coalitions and that the late 1980s and
early 1990s saw a policy paradigm shift. This article examines one detailed historical
case study, the plans to complete an inner road in Norwich and the subsequent
collapse of the scheme. The aim is firstly to examine the complex decision making
processes and subsequent politics of this scheme and secondly to relate the local
issue to the idea of a paradigm shift in national roads policy. The complexity of
decision making in a multi-actored arena, where sovereignty is located locally but
is circumscribed by central government ‘guidelines’, suggests that the assertions of
those who argue in terms of a paradigm shift in policy may be exaggerated.
POLICY PARADIGM SHIFT, ENVIRONMENTAL POLICIES AND
ROADS POLICY IN BRITAIN
Environmental politics in Western Europe have witnessed many examples
of perturbations of previously settled policy areas. In Britain we find
instances in recent years of established policy positions being sharply chal-
lenged or even overthrown. This has often involved existing settled policy
communities being sundered apart, as new pressure groups demand to be
heard, or as a result of shifts in the institutional arena of decision making;
but it has also involved a shift in the dominant values and in the discourse
which surrounds the particular policy area. Examples may be found in
agriculture (Smith 1989), nuclear power (Baumgartner and Jones 1991), the
use of pesticides (Bosso 1988) and coastal water policy (Jordan and Greena-
way 1998). Such upheavals have been related to a more general theoretical
debate among political scientists concerning the dynamics of this process.
At a time when policy appeared settled, analysis of the policy process
focused upon such factors as bureaucratic structures, or more broadly, pol-
icy networks and the interaction within them through resource exchanges
(power dependency). Rapid and dramatic policy shifts, on the other hand,
raise interesting questions about the role of ideas in promoting policy
change or, more interestingly, the nature of the exchange over policy ideas
together with the relationships between members of policy communities
John Greenaway is a Senior Lecturer in Politics in the School of Economic and Social Studies at the
University of East Anglia. Andrew Grantham is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Research in
Innovation Management at the University of Brighton.
Public Administration Vol. 78 No. 4, 2000 (815–833)
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
816 JOHN GREENAWAY AND ANDREW GRANTHAM
and exogenous forces (Marsh and Rhodes 1992). Various models have been
propounded to explain the pattern of change. Network theorists, for
example, see it resulting from a change in network structure: the outcome
of a dialectical process of strategic action from within networks, in the con-
text of a wider political-economic (macro-level) domain, which have the
capacity both to reinforce and fundamentally change policy and, by impli-
cation, state structures (Marsh 1998). Sabatier, on the other hand, stresses
concepts of policy learning; he has produced a systematic model in terms
of adversary coalitions, based upon core beliefs, which use policy learning
to battle for supremacy in policy sub-systems which are affected by exogen-
ous events and forces (Sabatier 1987, 1988, 1998, Sabatier and Jenkins Smith
1993). For his part, Peter Hall has pointed to the importance of policy para-
digms as shaping the policy process; most change, he argues, takes place
at a routine level at the calibration of settings of policy instruments or in
changes in those instruments themselves; but a more fundamental change
(‘third order change’) occurs more rarely in the overarching goals which
guide policy making when one policy paradigm is replaced by another
(Hall 1993).
Our aim in this article is to examine one application of such ideas – to
roads and transport policy in the UK – in the light of a single detailed case
study. In the 1950s and 1960s insider interest groups’ entrenched political
and bureaucratic positions were underpinned by a discourse which fav-
oured the use of the private car and presented the construction of highways
as an unquestioned community and economic benefit. In this connection
Britain was markedly different from much of the rest of Northern Europe
where there was a more varied approach to meeting transport needs. Frank
Hendriks has illustrated this difference very well in his comparison of atti-
tudes towards the construction of an inner ring road in Birmingham and
Munich in the post-war years. In Birmingham the process was characterized
by what he terms a ‘monocultural’ process: ‘the predominant characteristic
of the Inner Ring Road was its monofunctionality, its complete dedication
to the single function of moving cars around.’ This was a ‘typical engineer’s
plan’ and as such was reinforced by the closed nature of the local policy
community. By contrast Munich showed a more pluralist approach in terms
of both ideas and an ability to include a variety of citizens’ groups in the
policy process. It maintained trams, welcomed ideas for rapid rail and was
able to devise road plans which were designed to meet the needs of ped-
estrians, cyclists and local residents as well as car users (Hendriks 1994).
However, since 1980 policy on road building in Britain has become hotly
contested between two camps: a coalition of economic interests involved
in road transport and road construction on the one hand, and an environ-
mentalist lobby on the other. At first blush, the policy area seems an excel-
lent one to apply both theories of policy learning via competing adversary
coalitions and also concepts of policy paradigm shift.
Such an approach has been adopted to good effect by Dudley and Rich-
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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