The construction of urgency discourse around mega-projects: the Israeli case

Abstract

Various studies have pointed to urgency in decision-making as a major catalyst for policy change. Urgency evokes a crisis frame in which emotions and cognitive and institutional biases are more likely to be mobilised in support of the policy preferences of powerful actors. As a result, decision-makers tend to be driven by emotions and opportunity, often with detrimental results for the quality of the planning process. Although urgency has such a profound influence on the quality of decision-making, little is known about how, when, and by whom urgency is constructed in the planning process of public infrastructure. By means of a discourse analysis, this study traces the timing, motives and ways actors discursively construct a sense of urgency in decisionmaking on the building of terminals for the reception and treatment of the natural gas that was recently found off the coast of Israel. The results of this study indicate that mostly government regulators, but also private sector actors, deliberately constructed an urgency discourse at critical moments during the planning process. By framing the planning process as urgent, regulators manipulatively presented the policy issue as a crisis, during which unorthodox planning practices were legitimised while the consideration of alternative planning solutions was precluded. Thus, urgency framing is a means of controlling both the discourse and the agenda - and therefore an exercise in power-maintenance - by entrenched interest groups.