Sustainable Aviation Futures: Crises, Contested Realities and Prospects for Change

Abstract

PurposeThis chapter critically examines the fault-lines structuring contemporary debates on the politics and policy of aviation. In so doing, it generates different scenarios for the future of air travel. OriginalityThis chapter demonstrates the importance of the competing frames constituting the contested realities of air transport. Its mapping of the fault-lines of aviation politics and policy inform what it determines to be post-carbon, high-modernist, market regulation and demand management scenarios for the future of aviation. Methodology/approachThe chapter undertakes a critical review of existing literature, policy reports and stakeholder briefings, using the definition of sustainable development as a heuristic device to map and identify the fault-lines structuring contemporary debates on aviation futures. It then builds upon this analysis to constitute four different scenarios for the future of flying. FindingsThe chapter demonstrates the contested realities of aviation politics. It re-affirms the political nature of the fault-lines, which structure contemporary understandings of aviation. These fault-lines, the analysis suggests, are re-constituted in part by appeals to the ambiguities and contradictions of competing evidence-bases or policy frames. Any reframing of aviation policy and politics therefore ultimately rests on the outcome of political negotiations and persuasion, our broader views of the future challenges facing society, and how governments and other stakeholders put in place and coordinate the multiple arenas in which a dialogue over the future of aviation can be held. Aviation futures cannot be reduced to the narrow confines of the technical merits or claims surrounding the feasibility of policy instruments.

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