Denver Vale Nixon
UN SDGs
Walking in Their Shoes: Sustainable Transpor Policymaking, Embodiment and the Policy Adoption Gap
Faculty o Social Sciences
Prague Innovation Institute
This research investigates whether the experience of walking, cycling, or taking public transit by transport policymakers leads to policy that better supports these modes. Dominant transport systems in much of the world are carbon intensive and broadly socially and environmentally unsustainable. There is no absence of policy recommendations from transport and mobilities researchers that endorse and prescribe means to support a just and sustainable transition in mobility. Yet, this transition currently falls well short of the speed and magnitude necessary to achieve the transport systems desired before the planetary boundaries are dangerously exceeded. Some have called this the “policy adoption gap”. This persistent gap warrants additional complementary forms of intervention. Current approaches rely largely upon discursive persuasion, such as through research reporting. WIT instead takes an embodied experiential approach, asking: how do the particular mobility practices of transport policy makers influence their policy formulation? Theories such as standpoint feminism and embodied cognition suggest that embodied experience shapes understanding in ways that sometimes go beyond the knowledge gained and perspectives formed through purely discursive interactions, learning, and persuasion. No one has applied these theories to th challenge of transport policy formulation, and yet this may constitute an additional, possibly powerfu approach to realising transport systems that suppor the achievement of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10.2, 11.2 and 13. WITS will analyse the relationships between data from a survey of policymakers, their demographics, and the current and historical modes they use, and a database of their respective transport policy documents indexed by the strength of their support for active transport and public transit. Subsequent interviews will nuance the analysis. ****************************************************************************************** * Meet the Project ****************************************************************************************** If you had to explain your project to someone outside your field, how would you describe i sentences? My project, “Walking In Their Shoes,” investigates whether transportation policy makers wh use public transit may be more likely to craft and/or adopt policies that better support t study does this by comparing existing walking, cycling and public transit policy with poli means of mobility surveyed through ‘mobility biographies’. Realisation of a connection may just and sustainable transport systems. What fascinates you most about the topic of your research project? Most of the research and scholarship on embodied, experiential knowing has been either apo aimed at building theory, or liberatory and thus ‘practical’. The liberatory work has aime consciousness of the oppressed (as in feminism’s standpoint theory). My study is similarly but pursues a different, complementary tactic of liberation by potentially raising the con decision makers, not unlike the approach taken by the ancient Daoists (Taoists) of China. The study draws its inspiration not only from several academic disciplines, such as psycho and environmental anthropology, but also more diffuse sources, such as the Jamaican prover knows it,” Victoria (BC, Canada) city councillor Sharmarke Dubow’s motion challenging his to take the bus for a week, and my earlier doctoral research which found that using multip transport may enhance intermodal empathy. I am excited about applying these ideas to mobilities/transport in a practical way and I h new pathway to just and sustainable societal change in other areas as well. How does your research contribute specifically to achieving the UN Sustainable Development If policymakers use more diverse modes of transport, and this leads to greater understandi pedestrians’, cyclists’, and public transit users’ needs, then their emerging policy may d incentives (such as new infrastructure) and fewer disincentives to walk, cycle, and/or use these changes, a more diverse cross section of the population will experience improved mob transport system will become less environmentally damaging (SDG Goal 11.2). These changes which affect most aspects of people’s lives, may lead to reduced inequality (SDG Goal 10.2 population health and wellbeing (SDG 3), and reduced carbon impacts associated with climat Goal 13).
N.B. Funded by the European Union. Views and o are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the Europe European Research Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority responsible for them.