From global ideas to local action Building capacity to reshape urban transport policy

With climate change, market forces, and societal costs of car-dependency, the craft of urban transport planning faces new challenges. While alternative mindsets and practices are taking root, these changes have added tremendous uncertainty to future planning practices. In the face of uncertainty, progress can be difficult: it is unclear what to aim for and how any future transport system could come to fruition. This dissertation helps close the gap on such uncertainty. It prizes a rich understanding of the practice of urban planning, the underlying tenets of human-scaled transport systems, and showcases how core building blocks could travel between different settings.
A key way planners and city officials develop knowledge and capacity to engage with contemporary challenges is through policy transfer – to “learn from abroad” about policies, ideas, administrative systems, and institutions. Unresolved questions include whether, and to what extent, policy outcomes have resulted from learning through policy transfer, and whether this learning influences actions to facilitate trajectories of change in municipal transport systems. Should policy transfer serve a valuable instrument to governments, its role in learning has yet to be clarified. Using a mixed-methods approach, this thesis explores these unresolved issues and contributes to gaining a more complete picture of how learning at the ‘site of transfer’ occurs and how knowledge potentially assimilates from the individual and collective to wider circles. The research identifies policy transfer as a latent channel for institutional learning and unearths potential mechanisms and conditions of the process that could be leveraged.