Understanding Amsterdam Airport Schiphol through Controversies

Due to its ambiguous multi-actor character, the decision making process concerning complex governance systems, such as Amsterdam Airport Schiphol (AAS), is experienced as being incremental and highly indecisive. That is why in these cases collaborative arrangements of involved stakeholders are often created to give advice on how to tackle these complex problems. In this paper I would like to stress that complex problems and policy deadlocks cannot be resolved by the use of specialist knowledge and technical expertise. Even the opposite may be true: There is a multiplicity of stakes associated with specific issues while, at the same time, there are often disagreements about values, norms, objectives, research, information and knowledge; leading to complex and unstructured problems. This means that reductive solutions are not available.

To shed a different light on Schiphol’s deadlocked situation, I will use the Actor Network Theory (ANT). ANT not only takes the mutually intertwined impact of facts and values, governance and governance systems for granted, but it is more focused on (collaborative) politics in the making through socio-technical controversies. I will use these theoretical insights to analyse the quest for an alternate route design for the Schiphol Spijkerboor departure in 2009-2010. Redesigning this departure route became focal point of a major controversy between the concerned actors. The case will point out that decision-making processes should focus on the disposition of complexity: as a multiplicity of stakes and divergent perceptions arise, disagreements, ambiguities and uncertainties ensure that the decision-making process takes place in an undefined area somewhere between facts and values, where science and politics are mutually intertwined. By shifting the focus from “studying complexity” to “studying the disposition of complexity”, deadlocks can be understood in a different way, leading to new insights on how to break free from them.