Research Group: Sustainable Transport Policy
The Sustainable Transport Policy group aims to enhance the formulation and analysis of transport policy at local, national and international levels. Research in the group addresses the inter-relationships between transport policy and the economy, environment and society – the core of sustainable development. Alongside producing high quality academic outputs, the group generates wider impact by influencing government and other stakeholders. The group’s aim is to be demonstrably the most active research group in the world in this specific field.
The core methodological and theoretical strengths that underpin the work of the group are within three main strands:
Visioning and policy futures
Given the widespread public interest in uncertain futures concerning climate change, energy shortages, social cohesion, global factors etc, there has been a corresponding increasing interest in recent years from policy-makers in speculating about and understanding alternative long term scenarios. By comparison with 20 years ago, when it was generally considered sufficient to extrapolate current trends (typically concerning GDP and population) to the future, much more importance is now attached to creating alternative holistic images of the future. Work conducted across ITS research groups has addressed the challenge resulting from these real-world developments, including methodological issues on how consistent futures are conceptualised and modelled, and assessing the transport policy implications of uncertain futures.
Two broad complementary research directions are firstly the development of policy-oriented images of the future and secondly the development of conceptualisation and modelling techniques for creating internally consistent images. There is a need to draw together the expertise in this area and continue to develop the concepts and techniques as they provide a cutting edge context within which future research needs across a range of applications are defined. There are also opportunities to understand the ways in which decision-makers and citizens construct and interact with policy futures.
Policy design and governance
The design and development of new policies (e.g. congestion charging and carbon trading) is a key feature of the research of this group, drawing on theoretical understandings from the fields of economics, social psychology, urban geography and political science. Whilst traditionally the focus of research has been on policy design, there is an increasing trend to designing policies within the broader governance context within which they will be delivered. This requires a greater diversity of understanding of the formal and informal institutions that allocate resources and control activities across territories and sectors. The range of topics includes privatisation, regulation design, assessment methods, new public management and performance measurement, public choice competition theory and participatory processes.
There are three main growth areas in policy design and governance research, which ITS seeks to lead. First, the increasing destatisation and hollowing out of national governments will ensure that understanding multiple actor interactions (including competition effects and growth in the role and influence of non-governmental actors) and designing appropriate incentive and sanction regimes will grow in importance. There are opportunities to both transfer experience already garnered in the UK to Europe and also to respond directly to governmental research agendas in this area. Secondly, in the current climate of constrained finances, governments are looking for new governance strategies to make more effective use of their funding. Finally, the design of policies increasingly needs to respond to policy demands for better targeting (e.g. through social marketing techniques) and clearer understanding and mitigation of adverse distributional effects.
Appraisal and evaluation
Appraisal and evaluation are recognised as valuable parts of the policy cycle by governments and public bodies in the UK, EU and worldwide. Appraisal is essentially the analysis of alternative future policies, whilst evaluation is the analysis of policies that have been implemented. The dominant analytical methods in this field are cost-benefit analysis and multi-criteria analysis. The group has particular expertise in studying the distribution of impacts over time, space and population groups for a range of interlinked sustainability measures. Considerable ITS work across the Policy-Economics boundary draws together the overarching framework design with more detailed understanding of the valuation of different impacts (e.g. competitiveness and productivity).
Three main themes in this area provide the basis for developing ITS’ strengths. Firstly, continued development of linkages between transport appraisal and appraisal methods in adjacent policy areas - expertise in environmental impact appraisal, health impacts, quality of life, public realm and community satisfaction. Secondly, integration of alternative decision-making frameworks such as indicator systems, life-cycle assessment, ecological footprint or the Material Input per Service-unit concept. Appraisal tools will increasingly need to be capable of presenting information from a range of stakeholder perspectives and to cope with risk and uncertainty in more transparent ways to meet the challenges of sustainability appraisal. New methods of participatory engagement may also be needed to increase the legitimacy and acceptability of policies. Finally, the need for high quality ex-post evaluations of successes is widely acknowledged.
For further information about the Sustainable Transport Policy Research Group and its activities, please contact Dr Frances Hodgson
