PhD Project: EU Environmental Norms and Urban Mobility Transitions

EU Environmental Norms and their Relevance for Urban Mobility Transitions –
Making Progress with Norm Translation and Norm Performance

PhD Researcher: Nils Stockmann

• Research question(s): How do EU environmental norms and urban mobility transitions interact? What dynamics shape the translation and performance of norms within EU politics and transformative processes?

• Theoretical Framework: Constructivist and poststructuralist norm theory; recognition and (social/ environmental) justice; subject theory

• Methods: Qualitative-interpretative analyses of interviews and documents (discourse and content analysis based); participatory observations within case studies

EU environmental norms constitute an unignorable context for sustainable urban mobility transitions. Clashes of these norms with local identities, habits and perceptions cause multilayered conflicts that hamper sustainable transitions. Building a linkage between environmental norms with the claims and identities observable in urban arenas is therefore a crucial task. Despite these mechanisms, local processes to negotiate EU norms and their respective relations to other levels have not been discussed from a perspective that addresses the contextual discursive and performative prerequisites necessary to overcome these problems. Instead, norm processes have long be described from a diffusion perspective only not questioning the linearity and “shadow of hierarchy” (Börzel 2010) looming over EU politics.

In the dissertation project, the concept of norm translation (for an overview see Draude 2017) is re-conceptualized and used to analyze different translation contexts of EU environmental norms regarding urban mobility transitions. I expand norm translation by the newly developed concept of norm performance which, referring for example Butler (2010) and Hajer (2005), differentiates the performative dimension of norm processes to better account for both justice conflicts and the transformative capacities. With norm performance I ask what prerequisites enable actors to enact norms, that is, bringing them into use (similar to Wiener’s notion of norms as meaning-in-use; Wiener 2009). All in all, I suppose non-coercive processes, focusing on mutual learning, translation and staging of norms bring forward better policy solutions in terms of just and sustainable change. Different “claims” (Walker 2010) are more likely to be heard and altered on a knowledge-based foundation while at the same time ‘flattened’ authority allows for the integration of local knowledge into the process. Thereby, a truly transformative rather than a solely appellative norm translation is to be achieved. To elaborate on this notion, I will consider ‘new’ policy instruments of the EU such as Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) to analyze whether those fulfil this translative and performative criteria.

To achieve this, translation arenas of different European cities will be investigated as case studies, working with an interpretative, qualitative research design. Interviews and document analyses will be enriched by participatory observations within the distinctive cases.