Designing resilient infrastructure systems: a case study of decision-making challenges in railway tunnel projects

Abstract

In order to minimise the impact on society in the case of severe disturbances affecting infrastructure systems, it is essential that these systems are resilient to failures, i.e. that they are able to continue operations or quickly recover a stable state after a major mishap. Numerous opportunities for taking measures to increase resilience of infrastructures exist already in the design phase of new elements in these systems. This paper therefore investigates to what extent resilience of the railway system is considered at the design stage of new railway tunnels in Sweden. The case study builds upon interviews with key stakeholders involved in the decision-making process regarding safety measures in six railway tunnel projects, comprising a total of 28 tunnels (representing the majority of contemporary railway tunnel projects in Sweden). The theoretical perspective is based upon insights from the fields of resilience engineering and risk governance. The results revealed that power relations between the different stakeholders largely influenced the decision-making process in the studied railway tunnel projects. Diverse roles and perspectives among these actors led to disagreements in the majority of the projects. As a result, both of the key stakeholders experienced that they were trapped in different kinds of double binds, i.e. situations requiring a choice between equally bad outcomes. These double binds, and the significant influence from local actors on decision-making, resulted in a restricted consideration of the system’s resilience on the regional and national levels. These findings underline the important relationship between decision-making at the local level in each railway tunnel project and the impact from these decisions on the system’s resilience at the global level. The paper therefore contributes to increased understanding of the way that micro-level decisions affect macro-level characteristics of complex socio-technical systems.

Keywords:

• resilience
• risk governance
• double bind
• infrastructure
• railways

Acknowledgements

The Swedish Transport Administration is greatly acknowledged for the financial support through the RiBIT project. The author’s gratitude is also expressed to Peter Lundman at the Swedish Transport Administration for his assistance and cooperation during data collection. Finally, the author is grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her useful comments.

Notes

1. A fifth challenge presented by Woods (2003) includes ‘drift toward failure’. However, even though drift toward failure possibly has a great impact on a system’s resilience, a longitudinal study of a system’s operational phase would be required for examining drift toward failure. Therefore, this factor has not been considered in the analysis.

2. The Transport Administration replaced the former Rail Administration and Road Administration (2010), and therefore the names Transport Administration and Rail Administration will be used interchangeably throughout the paper depending on the context.