Municipal cycling governance developments in Latvia: towards sectorial planning and governance system requirement

Abstract

Nowadays considering that cycling as a widely increasing daily transport mode is becoming more popular and also more publicly required among all kinds of interest groups of our society, municipal policies and practical activities for local cycling developments are already steadily growing and will be a substantial part of municipal statutory development planning in Latvia, too, and that needs modern adaptive governance application and must be properly integrated within necessary sustainable municipal mobility approach. The study starts with an overview of the municipal cycling governance developments in Latvia as the aim of this research is to study the municipal cycling governance building frame, via the complementary set of cycling governance instruments application in terms of their development, implementation and impact evaluation – political and legal, institutional, planning, economic, infrastructure and also communication instruments. As the model’s case study area, Valmiera township municipality (case of medium and small size town municipalities in Latvia) was chosen, where our sustainable mobility studies have been step-wise continuing from 2016, particularly participatory documenting the cycling mobility development and its governance as sub-system of municipal mobility/transportation governance. The research methodologies applied included both research-and-development framework, being realized in active collaboration with municipal administration, and, case study research, allowing to provide integrative contextual analysis of the case phenomenon, including document studies, infrastructure observations with photo documentation, followed by semi-structured in-depth interviews with whole set of the main stakeholders. The study highlights direct necessity of the particular cycling mobility governance system approach understanding and adaptive application, based on three governance dimensions (governance content, stakeholders and instruments). Besides social-ecological system as governance content dimension approach and stakeholders’ participation as governance stakeholders’ dimension approach, also and particularly, not only to use usually emphasized infrastructure planning, but further design and complementary use of all groups of traditional governance instruments, also additionally developing adaptive governance based disciplinary/sectorial cycling mobility instruments, esp. whole set of cycling communication instruments (information, education/training, participation, pro-cycling friendly behaviour). This triple governance dimensions’ model and principle as well as action policy recommendations elaborated may be used by the other local municipalities starting to expand cycling mobility.