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Download This PDF File STSS Vol 10 / Issue 1 Bigger is Better or how Governments Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Megaprojects 3 Studies of Transition States and Societies Bigger is Better or how Governments Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Megaprojects Filippo Menga* 1 : Abstract: Megaprojects, with their sheer size and their physical and emotional impact, can emerge as central elements around which political elites construct an ideology. Following a comparison of the narratives surrounding the Strait of Messina Bridge in Italy and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan, I find that similar narratives appear in arguments for mega projects across different regime types, as advocates portray large infrastructure as a panacea for varied problems and thus justify the significant investment such projects require. Politicians in both Italy and Tajikistan have embraced images of heroic progress toward a better future to frame megaprojects as inevitable signs of progress and national well-being. Keywords: Italy, Tajikistan, megaprojects, symbolism. “I have a dream, I always had it in my heart: being able to go through, before I die, the bridge over the Strait, that will make of Sicily a super-Italian land” (Silvio Berlusconi, 2013) “The Rogun [Dam] is not only a source of light, but of national honour and dignity” (Emomali Rahmon, 2010) Introduction Megaprojects are very large infrastructure investments that generally cost more than US$1 billion. As Altshuler and Luberoff (2003, p. 2) observed, the term megaproject usually denotes “initiatives that are physical, very expensive, and public”. Highways, aqueducts, ports, dams, and bridges can all fall into this category and can become, among other things, drivers of development and powerful political symbols. Iconic structures that fall into this category include the Aswan High Dam in Egypt, the Channel Tunnel linking France to England, the Brooklyn Bridge in the United States, and the Three Gorges Dam in China. Megaprojects appear to have both performative and discursive effects, and they have to be considered as political and physical animals (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Despite this, very few studies (among others, Steinberg, 1987; Van Der Westhuizen, 2007; Sovacool & Cooper, 2013; Menga, 2015) have investigated the political value of megaprojects, and academic research has generally focused on their engineering and economic dimensions (van Marrewijk, 2013). This study aims to contribute to our knowledge of how political elites build support for megaprojects and use them to increase their political capital. To do so, I will discuss and compare the narratives surrounding two projects: the Strait of Messina Bridge (SoMB) in Italy and the Rogun Dam in Tajikistan. This study will point to recurring elements in the megaproject ideology perpetuated by political elites and show that megaprojects typically cease to be the means to an end (such as energy security or faster transportation of people and goods) and become the end itself. The present article also explores the symbolic value of megaprojects, an issue that has thus far received scant attention in the research literature, with the exceptions falling into architectural and urban studies rather than political science (Olds, 2001; Ren, 2008). The choice of critical case studies (see Flyvbjerg, 2006) located in two extremely different countries is intentional, as it allows this study to explore an uncharted dimension of the politics of * E-mail of corresponding author: [email protected] 4 Filippo Menga megaprojects: whether political regimes and the elements forming the ideologies of megaprojects correlate at all. On the one hand, Italy is a democracy with a competitive political system, political alternation, and regularly contested elections. Major political parties have significant access to the electorate through free media (Lijphart, 2012). On the other hand, Tajikistan is an authoritarian regime1, where Emomali Rahmon has served as President since 1994. Rahmon’s administration tightly controls the media, which is the government’s mouthpiece (Olcott, 2012). Italy is a founding member of the European Union, and is part of the Group of Seven (G7) world’s leading industrialised countries. Tajikistan was part of the Soviet Union until 1991, and is currently the poorest of all the 15 former Soviet republics (UNDP, 2014). These differences could have produced different ideological standpoints or at least different ways of disseminating them. However, findings reveal that the ideologies Rahmon and his Italian counterpart Silvio Berlusconi used to advance their megaprojects have virtually no difference from one another. In line with the argument of James C. Scott (1998), being an authoritarian or a democratic regime can play a crucial role in determining the fate of a specific scheme. The remainder of this paper is divided into four sections. The next section lays out the theoretical underpinning of this study and explains how data were collected and analysed. The third section presents the two case studies and the context in which they are located. The fourth section delineates the main elements that form the megaproject ideology. The fifth section concludes with a discussion of the results and makes recommendations for further research. Theoretical framework and data collection method The shapers of politics include emotions and passions (Crawford, 2000). Aristotle’s (1991) hugely influential treatise The Art of Rhetoric illustrated how rhetoric can manipulate emotions, introducing the emotional/rational dichotomy to political analysis. This inspired many political philosophers and most notably René Descartes (1989), who made a distinction between body and soul to argue that emotions stem from the perceptions of the soul. Murray Edelman (1985, p. 1) later expanded this perspective in his classic book The Symbolic Uses of Politics, which explored political symbols and the ‘obsessional, mythical and emotional’ side of politics. Edelman distinguished between two types of political symbols: referential and condensation. If, on the one hand, “[r]eferential symbols are economical ways of referring to the objective elements in objects or situations… [c]ondensation symbols evoke the emotions associated with the situation. They condense into one symbolic event, sign, or act of patriotic pride, anxieties, remembrances of past glories or humiliations, promises of future greatness: some one of these or all of them” (Edelman, 1985, p. 6). The notion of condensation symbols thus appears to be connected to the creation of meanings, and indeed, as Elder and Cobb (1983: 28) explain, “A symbol is any object used by human beings to index meanings that are not inherent in or discernible from the object itself. Literally anything can be a symbol: a word or a phrase, a gesture or an event, a person, a place, or a thing. An object becomes a symbol when people endow it with meaning value or significance.” Based on this emotional side of politics and on the appreciation of the role of symbols in the creation and dissemination of a political rhetoric (see for instance Weeden, 1999), megaprojects, with their sheer size and their physical and emotional impact, can emerge as central elements around which an ideology is produced. Political elites tend to use public discourse to legitimate their power (Van Dijk, 2008), and the realisation of a megaproject can readily be framed to help them gain and maintain popular support. In this regard, the mass media can play a key role in disseminating an ideology. As Molle et al. (2009, p. 266) noted, the media “often contributes to turning unavoidability into common wisdom”. Likewise, proponents of megaprojects would most likely disseminate an ideology that represents their construction as necessary, beneficial to society, and inevitable if they want to obtain consent and popular support for their realisation. 1 While there is no consensus on how to measure democracy (see for instance Aslaksen, 2010), organizations and think tanks such as Freedom House and The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) publish yearly assessments of the state of democracy at the global level. For instance, in the Democracy Index 2014 published by the EIU, Italy is classified as a democracy (even though a ‘flawed one’), ranking 29th out of 167 countries, while Tajikistan is classified as an authoritarian regime, occupying the 156th position (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2015). Bigger is Better or how Governments Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Megaprojects 5 Using discourse analysis, this paper focuses on political elites and on their discursive constructions of the SoMB and the Rogun Dam. While both projects have long histories, both are in initial phases, which makes them ripe for appropriation by political leaders. The sources include both official and unofficial documents. The former include public speeches, official statements, and publicly available government documents. The latter include statements reported by news agencies and national newspapers. These represent some of the key tools the state uses to inculcate a specific ideology in the masses (Wolff, 2005). Specifically, the news sources in Italy are Factiva, a news aggregator that offers a comprehensive screening of the Italian press, including leading periodicals such as Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica and La Stampa, and news agencies such as the Agenzia Giornalistica Italia (AGI) and ANSA. The period analysed is from January 2001 to March 20132. This includes four Italian national elections (2001, 2006,
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