Project Details

Project goal

For the first time, our company became active in the European Research Area Network (ERA-NET) on Transport. We joined a consortium of five research organisations and consultancies from Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Poland to carry out the SHAPE-IT project.

SHAPE-IT focused on factors that influence the effectiveness of sustainable transport policies - the specific emphasis here is on the integration of policies and policy processes.

This project kicked-off in the small town of Gävle in Sweden on 27 May 2013, just one day prior to the ERA-NET Stepping Stones Conference at the same place.

The project tried to help explaining, why policies are successful in one place, but not in another. To do that, SHAPE-IT examined the influence of policy processes and the role of policy integration on the ability of a measure to influence behaviour. The project brought together the analyses from four policy integration cases and four process case studies and compared the results and explored the potential of SUMPs as tool for policy integration and participatory processes. This allowed for the identification of key factors for success and failure and for identifying the opportunities to enhance the effectiveness of policies through integration and participatory processes.

Results

Some countries participating in the Era-net Transport Network started working together by financing common research in the sector “How is the implementation of Sustainable Mobility in several countries carried out in practice?” and “Why are these measures successful in one case and not in the other case?” The research goal was to facilitate and to provide policy makers with tools on how to implement mobility management at local and regional level in a successful and sustainable way. This led to the trans-national program “Stepping Stones”, financially supported by Germany, Sweden, Poland, Great Britain and the Netherlands. The main focus of Stepping Stones was on an effective and efficient (combinations of) measures for more sustainable mobility patterns, and the process to implement these measures. Selected from a calI for tenders three consortia were chosen consisting of 12 research organizations in total: SHAPE-IT, Step-by-Step and GPS.

Mid 2013 the three consortia started working with these research questions, each project from a different specific scope. In total more than 60 mostly successful cases in various European cities have been examined. Leading research questions have been “What were the measures to influence mobility behaviour?”, “How were these measures implemented” and “What were the results?” The experts involved in these cases were queried, the findings analyzed and linked with the findings from other cases.

Each of the three consortia has delivered a comprehensive report with important conclusions and recommendations. In addition to the description of each measure including the WHAT question, also the HOW and the WHY questions have been addressed. HOW were these measures implemented and how were the process steps for implementing the measures successful and WHY have these measures been successful or not at the end.

You can find the final report in the download section of this page.

Project partners

• Wuppertal Institut für Klima, Umwelt, Energie, Wuppertal, Germany
• Rupprecht Consult GmbH, Cologne, Germany
• VTI - Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, Linköping, Sweden
• Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands (ECN), Petten, Netherlands
• Technical University of Krakow (PK), Politechnika Krakowska im.Tadeusza Kosciuszki, Krakow, Poland