CO2-emissions from traffic - increasingly from freight transport - are growing, especially in the highly developed industrialized countries. The answers to this environmentally problematical development are technical ones mainly: Administrators and scientists try to improve engines,...

The paper asks how the modal shift from road to rail in the freight sector is sup-ported by institutional change. Following North (1990), institutions are understood as the "rules of the game" in the rail freight sector. Based on the literature on institutional change, four different...