MOVE21 partner RISE conducted mapping in the Living Labs of Oslo, Gothenburg and Hamburg on governance environments, enablers and hindering factors to identify common factors for all three cities and point towards future work on governance innovation and related topics for the next two years.
Engagement, openness, transparency and inclusiveness
All enabling factors for governance innovation identified so far point in the same direction. Engagement, openness, transparency and inclusiveness are all key factors that aid governance innovation.
Engagement and proactive work of the local teams is an important enabling precondition. This is especially true for the departments and persons in municipalities who lead and coordinate the Living Labs in the respective cities. Active inclusion of potential stakeholders in the process of planning and shaping the solutions are equally important. The analysis shows that when relevant stakeholders are identified early on and the co-creation processes are open, inclusive and contribute to ownership, the implementation processes are positively stimulated.
Co-creation and collaboration with a broad spectrum of actors create transparency in decision-making. Forums for knowledge exchange and mutual learning between all involved actors, both private and public, are an important cornerstones for creating legitimacy. Legitimacy is important in the case of testing and implementing innovative solutions that might require actors to change their behaviour, change norms and habits, or require them to collaborate with unusual counterparts both individually and in business models.
Naturally, a few aspects that hinder the implementation of measures and concepts have also been identified. These centre often around alignment of interests, priorities and goals, communication and regulations. We have observed difficulties with the harmonization of the actions needed for implementation and the local (and sometimes regional/national) regulations. Transport is a complex sector. Multiple stakeholders with diverse interests and priorities as well as affected areas and target groups (customers), often also entail that different regulations apply. It is a challenge to find effective ways to harmonize local regulations and policies that would favour the implementation of the pilots and fit the suggested innovative solutions in a given (short) timeframe of the project.
The development of robust and self-sustaining business models for the pilots to continue to function after the Move21 project’s lifetime is another common struggle. The new/changed regulations might become drivers and catalysts for change in business and even create new markets by stimulating the development of new business models with new actors with innovative solutions to freight and transport. The development of new sustainable and long-term oriented business models remains one of the challenges to pilots’ implementation. The challenge of finding actors who would be willing to take responsibility and drive the innovations further is a related issue to the one on sustainable business models. There is often a certain confusion about the operative roles of different actors beyond municipalities; their relations towards each other and responsibilities. “Who does what and who is responsible?”
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- Conflicts of interests between private actors that are driven by profit and competition is another complication. The responsible actors who lead the pilots find it difficult to find ways to pursue private competing actors to collaborate.
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- Finally, lack of collaboration and cooperation within the different departments of the municipalities,lack of common understanding of the goals and the possible (new) ways to achieve them, lack of understanding of synergies, as well as administrative hinders such as lack of time and resources were found in all three cities and were articulated as one of the major difficulties to implement innovation.
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These factors and further city-specific aspects will be worked on during the next two years in order to maximise replication and upscaling potential, and contribute with knowledge and insights on governance innovation and related aspects. he above-mentioned factors will be important for the Replicator Cities to manage and a guiding principle of MOVE21 is that all actors can learn from other actors’ successes as well as challenges.
For more information please contact:
Olga Stepanova, RISE at: olga.stepanova@ri.se, Johan Granberg, RISE at: johan.granberg@ri.se