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MANAGING THE TRANSITION TO SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORT THROUGH STRATEGIC NICHE MANAGEMENT

Present-day transport exhibits many problems. Worldwide, about 250,000 people die in road accidents every year. Emissions of pollutants from vehicles degrade air quality causing health hazards to humans and other living species. Emissions of greenhouse gases contribute to global warming. The continuously increasing number of vehicles gives rise to congestion, which causes time delays and reduced accessibility and threatens the livability of cities and living quarters. Typically, these problems are split into behavioral and technological problems, which determines how solutions are sought. Over the past decade, however, policy makers as well as many others have become more and more skeptical towards possibilities to influence people's travel behavior. At the same time, interest has grown in technical options to tackle congestion problems. There appears to be a shift from the behavioral approach to the technological approach. This shift does not remain uncontested, however. Those concerned with the environment and the livability of cities continue to emphasize that only a change of behavior of travelers can lead to fundamental (or sustainable) solutions for traffic and transport problems. This opposing view can be seen as a call for a cultural or social fix instead of a technical fix. Restricting mobility is seen as the way forward. This paper argues for an approach aimed at stimulating both behavioral change and technical change. This approach is Strategic Niche Management (SNM). It consists of experiments; users in the experiments are real users. SNM is about the creation and management of spaces for experience to facilitate learning and institutional embedding, two key processes in transformation (conceptualized as socio-technical regime shifts). SNM rests on two fundamental assumptions. The first assumption is that the introduction of new technologies is a social process that is neither an unavoidable deterministic result of an internal scientific and technological logic, nor a simple resultant of the operation of the market mechanisms. This assumption has been captured by the notion of co-evolution or co-production. The second assumption is that it makes sense to experiment with this co-evolutionary nature of technology. Such experiments can be envisaged as (part of) a niche in which technologies are specified and consumers are defined and concretized. Experiments make it possible to establish an open-ended search and learning process, and also to work towards societal embedding and adoption of new technology. The authors describe 3 experiments: a market test of converted electric vehicles in the French town of La Rochelle, an experiment with individualized public transport using telematics called Praxitele, and an experiment with sustainable community transport. The experiments are analyzed through the lens of SNM, focusing on what has been learned and what could have been learned through a different set up. The authors also evaluate SNM, compare it with other policy approaches, and point out the roles of private and public actors.

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Features: References; Tables;
  • Pagination: p. 175-203

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 00962792
  • Record Type: Publication
  • ISBN: 0309085713
  • Files: TRIS, TRB
  • Created Date: Sep 5 2003 12:00AM