The future of regional airports in Australia: Policy challenges

Council‐owned regional airports in Australia face governance challenges that have caused significant financial unsustainability across the sector. Federal policy frameworks fail to address these challenges and risk exacerbating existing pressures by outlining ambitious visions for the adoption of new technologies and achieving net zero. The current Aviation White Paper rests on overly optimistic assumptions about council capacity and ignores the gap between federal‐level policy design and the realities of implementation at the local level. This study uses a scenario planning approach. Data gathered from stakeholder interviews and desktop research were used to underpin the development of future‐oriented narratives describing how these regional airports might evolve over the next 25 years, with these narratives then being subjected to expert validation. Regardless of whether demand for regional passenger services grows or stagnates, sustaining regional airports requires rethinking the distribution of responsibility across government levels and developing governance frameworks flexible enough to support the heterogeneity of regional airport contexts. Such challenges extend beyond aviation as the distribution of infrastructure responsibilities across multiple government tiers without adequate institutional support creates conditions for policy failure that compound over time and resist resolution through incremental policy adjustment.

Points for practitioners

Top‐down policy formulation in the field of public infrastructure provision could lead to uneven implementation outcomes, especially in heterogeneous regional contexts.