Governance of Transport Corridors in OIC Member States:
Challenges, Cases and Policy Lessons
42
infrastructure towards establishing governance institutions was a relatively small step. Although the
objectives of TEN-T were established in the knowledge exchange phase between 1985 and 1992, talks
on the governance and its legal basis were largely skipped.
Aparicio (2017) notes that TEN-T as a policy instrument is best described as a story of ambition and
power with a weak technical logic, and insufficient economic and environmental assessment of
impacts. He notes that the development of TEN-T is justified by the statement that ‘transport
development leads to economic growth’, however, this relationship is less casual in reality than it is in
the minds of policy makers. To address this issue, Aparicio (2007) suggests to first focus more on
improving the transport infrastructure rather than developing the infrastructure assuming it will lead
to economic development; and secondly towards including more stakeholder in the governance
process to prevent wrongly targeted infrastructure development. Another point made by Aparicio
(2017) is that TEN-T provides biased incentives to some member states to overspend on
infrastructure, in which European added value of many projects are exaggerated. Especially for local
governments, they have been using the TEN-T label to bargain funds from national governments for
projects with dubious benefits. This has led to the situation that, up until 2008, TEN-T was more to be
regarded as a patch of projects rather than an integrated whole. The following years saw some
improvement, most notably in that the priority projects were redefined from 30 individual projects
into nine corridors, with higher priority given to the development of the corridors, rather than the EU
wide network. Nevertheless, Aparacio (2017) states there is still a lack of access by stakeholders to the
deliberative process and a lack of formalization of consultation and isolation with respect to other
policy fields.
The lessons learned can be summarized as:
 Treat narrative ‘better transport equals economic growth’ with care, both for developed and less-
developed regions. There is little evidence that investment in new transport infrastructure leads to
cohesion;
 Focus on transport efficiency and multimodality;
 Focus on the planning process by including theme’s such as deliberative planning, include
stakeholders, transparency, and integrated planning;
 Promote governance on an international level to prevent national oriented focusses. Develop the
transport system as an integrated whole and avoid isolated developments. The rule ‘the system is
only as good as its weakest link’ applies here.
Good practice of corridor governance
With TEN-T being the corridor with the highest level of integration in terms of governance, there are
a number of aspects that have evolved over time to become best practice, as illustrated below.
 TEN-T consist of a clear system based on two pillars that separates ordinary transport investments
(the comprehensive network) from priority investments (the core network);
 Priority investments are developed according of an underlying rationale, the nine corridors, which
represent the most crucial transport routes in Europe;
 As laid down in the legal framework of TEN-T, TEN-T’s governance institutions have high influence
over its member states. This facilitates transport development for the ‘common European good’
rather than national oriented investments;