Questions of governance: Rethinking the study of transportation policy

Greg Marsden and Louise Reardon

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2017, vol. 101, issue C, 238-251

Abstract: This paper critiques the state of the art approaches to studying transportation policy. It does so through analysing 100 papers sampled from the two leading policy journals in the transportation literature. On applying two different frameworks for understanding policy, the review finds that only 13% of papers consider specific aspects of the policy cycle, that 60% focus on ‘tools’ for policy, and that two-thirds of papers did not engage with real-world policy examples or policy makers and focussed on quantitative analysis alone. We argue that these findings highlight the persistence of the technical-rational model within the transportation literature. This model, and the numerous traditions and disciplines that have fed into it have an important role to play in developing the transportation evidence base. However, we argue there are important questions of governance; such as context, power, resources and legitimacy, that are largely being ignored in the literature as it stands. The substantial lack of engagement with governance issues and debates means that as a field we are artificially, but more importantly, disproportionately generating a science of applied policy making which is unlikely to be utilised because of the distance between it and the realities on the ground. The paper identifies analytical approaches deployed readily in other fields that could be used to address some of the key deficiencies.

Keywords: Governance; Policy process; State of the art; Transportation; Technical-rational model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (60)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856416305869
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:transa:v:101:y:2017:i:c:p:238-251

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
https://shop.elsevie ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2017.05.008

Access Statistics for this article

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice is currently edited by John (J.M.) Rose

More articles in Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().