This paper reviews the contribution of experts to the appraisal of large infrastructures, looking at the evaluation performed in 2019 in Italy by the Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports on the Lyon-Turin railway project. This evaluation had been initiated in a particular context, linked to a visible policy agenda and while the construction of the tunnel had already begun. The appraisal has produced surprising results, mostly counterintuitive and heavily criticized. We analyse these results and show how they can be valid, in that they would not result from inconsistency in the method but from the peculiar features of the project (low initial demand, high mode transfer compared with initial traffic, high road tax and toll levels). We also check the validity of some paradoxical results of the assessment. Moreover, the public debate has been made more difficult due to an inconsistency in EU evaluation Guidelines. Also, we analyse mechanisms that affect the credibility of experts and we find that the influence of experts in the public debate has little to see with the inherent consistency of the methods used.
The paper presents a model designed to analyse port governance. It considers that thestakeholders ability to adopt cooperative behaviors constitutes the key element to portdevelopment. Its focus is on medium-sized European ports and fifteen cases were studied. Eachterritory was first subject to a qualitative survey and analysis of the contents of local stakeholdersdiscourse (over 80 interviews conducted). The material is rich, allowing for the comparisonbetween two or even three ports, yet the delicate nature of the relations brought to light addsconsiderable complexity to the comparison within a larger ensemble. The paper, therefore,proposes a semi-automatic treatment which helps to mitigate this difficulty by means of acomputer model based on graph theory. It involves a modelling system based on the relationsbetween the entities of the system. In this context, the relations between stakeholders wereanalysed in order to create typologies and eventually envisage some standard models ofgovernance. In order to territorialize the subject, six typical cases out of fifteen were used: LeHavre, Nantes-Saint Nazaire, Dunkirk (France), Gdynia (Poland), Klaipėda (Lituania), Hamina-Kotka (Finland).All these port environments modelled according to a single format (i.e. a graph) led to theapplication of a certain number of metrics which enables them to be compared. Two mainmetrics were presented in the framework of this paper for illustrative purposes: “Density” and“S_metric”. […]