Planning the Airport “Berlin Brandenburg International”Use of Statistics and Policy Makingby Berlin and Brandenburg Government

Aim of this paper is to describe the present status of using statistics by metropolitan and regional governments in the Federal Republic of Germany FRG in order to promote or prevent special decisions. Methodological approach is: Exemplarily it is focused an actual planning procedure going over several years but now terminated where (besides the federal government) a metropolitan and a regional government were involved. This procedure is analyzed in order to show how these governments use the same statistical data for different political purposes and interests.Subject of this empirical example is the planning procedure for the location of the future metropolitan airport Berlin Brandenburg International (abbreviation BBI) of the metropolis and province Berlin with about 3.3 million inhabitants surrounded by the more rural province Brandenburg with about 2.7 million inhabitants in Germany. In contrary to the author’s paper to the SCORUS conference in Shanghai 14-16 October which centred the role of social indicators within this planning procedure, this paper centres the political process and the used arguments.When the idea of this airport called “Berlin Brandenburg International” arose, from the early beginning after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 it was clear that its location couldn’t be realized within the area of Germany’s metropolis Berlin; so a cooperation with province Brandenburg for the finally location, and with the Federal Republic of Germany as keeper of the national flight rights couldn’t be avoided. However, as the interests of the metropolis Berlin and its neighboured province Brandenburg with mainly rural structure are different, both governments made use of statistics to support their own and different aims and policy, respectively, by the procedure to find the best location including a procedure for environmental assessment. The paper documents this process since the 1990th and the arguments. It concludes that already in the 1990th the different interests of the involved governments to a c