In 2011 the agreement parties of the Fehmarn Belt fixed link conciliation in the Danish parliament decided to follow up on Femern A/S’ recommendation of building the world’s longest immersed tunnel across the Fehmarn Belt. For many years, prior to this decision, the preferred technical solution was planned as cable-stayed bridge, but that changed when two groups of consultants presented conceptual design proposals for an immersed tunnel and a cable-stayed bridge.
The main focus in this project is to investigate how and which changes happened to the basis in the decision-making, regarding the preferred technical solution.
The empirical data in this study is analysed in a socio-technical context in the application of the actor network theory. The empirical data consists of scientific documents and political agreements regarding the decision-making process - and interviews with politicians of the agreement parties, project directors of the consultant groups, and selected individuals of Femern A/S’ direction during the time of the decision-making.
We can conclude that in the period of 2008 to 2011 a displacement has happened in the way the technical basis is considered in the decision-making. Femern A/S has partially expelled the technical arguments and instead evaluated the choice between the two technical alternatives based on a number of political considerations. This caused the change of the preferred technical solution for the Fehmarn Belt fixed link