Governance towards Low Carbon Mobility: Exploring Opportunities and Challenges in Different Policy Networks

A low carbon mobility system is integral to energy demand reduction and essential if the UK wants to meet its target of net-zero emissions by 2050. However, despite the UK having legally binding targets for over a decade, emissions from transport have grown and the sector is now the UK’s largest emitter, accounting for 28% of UK emissions. Moreover, high levels of congestion persist in and around regional employment and cultural centres, despite a continued decrease in the number of commuting trips (and population increase) since 1995. Therefore urgent and significant policy change is required. This paper draws on research funded by the Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions (CREDS) and is most closely aligned to the interests of the panel ‘analysing state capacity for emission neutrality’ in this Section. This paper takes a ‘decentred’ approach to understanding the ways in which policy networks understand the challenge of low carbon mobility, and the barriers and opportunities for policy change towards achieving this goal. A decentred approach ‘…necessitates understanding the diverse sets of narratives, meanings and actions that comprise governing practices’ (Bevir, McKee and Matthews 2017, 9). Here then ‘…analysis turns to the ways in which the traditions and beliefs of actors cause them to construct situations in differing ways and to determine different pathways to action' (Finlayson 2007). A decentred approach emphasises a focus on human agency, subjective understanding and local narratives as the starting point for understanding, whereas a focus on formal governance arrangements starts from the constituted roles and responsibilities of organisations and how they then influence actor behaviour. Building on this approach, the paper identifies the institutions involved in policy networks relating to low carbon mobility in two city regions; Birmingham and Cambridge (both in the UK). It identifies how these networks frame the problem of emissions reduction; how these framings then affect their (perceived) capacity to affect policy change, and then shape their policy approaches towards emissions reduction. The analysis draws on original network visualisations of the institutions involved in each city region to identify the actors involved. It then utilises findings from collaborative causal loop mapping exercises done with stakeholders in each network to identify what actors perceive as the variables that affect movement towards low carbon mobility and the connections and causality between the variables. Through the discussions, the variables actors believe they have control over will come to the fore, highlighting where network actors feel they have the capacity to affect change. These two methods are complimented and supported by interviews with a comprehensive range of stakeholders from across the policy networks to understand their perceptions of where power and capacity lay in terms of emissions reduction, and how network actors work together (or not) to achieve this goal.