Chapter 6: Airport Companies as Silent Partners: The Complex Interplay between Public and Private Ownership

Drawing on an original dataset of major European airport companies, this chapter demonstrates the growing role airport infrastructures and their managing authorities have come to play in shaping airport politics that is, how, by whom and where airports are built, modernized and expanded.

Airport infrastructures and companies have received little attention in recent attempts to characterize and explain the transformations of global aviation politics.

This chapter suggests focusing on airport companies as an attempt to characterize their long-term trajectories both in terms of their properties and in terms of their operating contexts.

The chapter shows that airport managing authorities have developed into full-blown economic actors, which enjoy greater levels of autonomy through the systematic accumulation of resources, the diversification of revenues, and new alliances with the global finance and consulting industry. The chapter also discusses the role of privatization as the main driver for change in major European airport markets. Finally, it demonstrates the extent to which the complex interplay between public and private ownership has shaped the rescaling of the territorial dimension of airport activities, thus explaining the limited impact of anti-airport campaigns over the long-term development of major European hubs.

This chapter has larger practical and research implications, as it demonstrates the need to go beyond a functional and context-dependent approach to airport infrastructures and managing companies.