A review of case study-based academic literature on public participation in sustainable mobility

Abstract

Developments to promote sustainable mobility require active and effective public participation projects in which the form of participation (e.g., consulting citizens), the objective of the project (e.g. harnessing local knowledge), and the indicators to assess if the project was effective (e.g., participants’ evaluations) are aligned. In practice, this alignment seems to be rare, but scientific research backing up this claim is lacking. For this scoping review, we have collected and analyzed peer-reviewed case studies on public participation projects for sustainable mobility in 14 countries. Per case, we identified forms, objectives, and effectiveness indicators and assessed their level of alignment. Our main findings show a wide variety of participation forms, of which consultation was the most dominant. Cases also often had multiple objectives, and many projects included measures to evaluate their effectiveness. Most relevant and in line with what we assumed, almost all of the projects demonstrated a degree of misalignment between objectives and effectiveness evaluation standards. Although these results do not imply that public participation projects in sustainable mobility are not effective, it does seem to suggest that participation can benefit from a more structured and aligned approach.