The Making & Unmaking of East-West Link

This thesis looks at an infamous case of infrastructure policymaking in Australia: Victoria's East-West Link. A multi-billion-dollar road tunnel, East-West was bitterly contested, subject of fierce debate, protests, court challenges and political brinkmanship, culminating in the project's cancellation in 2015. All told the fiasco resulted in the wasting of over a billion dollars of public money. This thesis asks where East-West Link came from and what went wrong, seeking insights from three different theoretical approaches, and in the process investigating the state of policymaking in Victoria and polities like it.