Edinburgh Napier University

  Many of the processes of strategic planning and transport have long been based on slow changing environments where much of the operational investment could reasonably be undertaken on the basis that, if the present was well understood, the projections were largely adequate to undertake quite significant investments. Remarkably, this has also been broadly true for the complex area of freight modelling and planning, where predicting the present and straightforward projections on the economic base or employment numbers have proved to be adequate for most purposes in the views of the majority of current customers for such information and analysis. While these rates of change and development have proved at a broad level to be reasonably workable in the past, better understanding of the long persistent roots for the political processes with which they have been entangled is beginning to emerge from studies of the development and influences of major projects across the world (e.g. Sturup and Low 2008). The reasons that such systems have proved to be not too unsatisfactory in the past is because rates of change in society and infrastructure have not in general been very rapid. This is now changing, and the prospects of more rapid change, and certainly greater levels of turbulence, are now quite substantial. The horizons for policy development, infrastructure decisions, and major construction now place a significant amount of this long period within the zone where rapid changes are now highly probable. The decade long processes common for major infrastructure policy formation, planning and implementation are now subject to considerable review during their lifecycle. This is not only because the policies themselves are starting to feel the effects of climate change, oil price increases and the need to moderate and diminish carbon emissions, they are now also about to be subject to very different evaluation processes and greater levels of interdependency between the previously far more distinct areas of physical planning and transport provision. A considerably higher level of government flexibility management and responsiveness would seem to be warranted, to manage the shortfalls in the transfer of broad strategy planning to operational on the ground events. Here we raise some of the issues involved, and focus on improving the governance processes so that the private, public, commercial and systems have the capacity, information, ability and power to respond.