GUIDEMAPS - Gaining Understanding of Improved Decision Making and Participation Strategies
Overview
Background & policy context:
Developing sustainable transport strategies and delivering transport schemes are often contentious and high profile activities that require skill and sensitivity in engaging with a broad range of stakeholders, ranging from local politicians and the media, through local residents and businesses, to national pressure groups.
Stakeholder engagement is being taken increasingly seriously by local authorities, and in recognition of the value of effective engagement as a means of minimising public opposition and designing more effective schemes.
However, until now there has been relatively little guidance available on how to engage stakeholders in a variety of transport strategies and schemes, and as part of an efficient and effective project management process:
- Who are the key stakeholder groups?
- How can effective engagement and media strategies be devised?
- Which tools are appropriate in different situations?
The underpinning rationale for the project was that an understanding of subjective factors is as important as objective measures of performance and impact if authorities are to succeed in introducing transport schemes that promote behavioural change. Carrying out the project at the EU level enabled the identification of a variety of good practice in Member States and by encouraging widespread adoption across the Union.
Objectives:
The principle aim of GUIDEMAPS was to identify procedures and tools to improve policy decision-making and achieve sustainable mobility throughout the European Union, by overcoming barriers and delivering better policy outcomes.
The detailed objectives of the GUIDEMAPS project were:
- to look at the state-of-the-art of decision-making and engagement in the transport-planning in Europe;
- to identify the barriers to successful decision-making;
- to identify procedures and tools to improve policy decision-making and achieve sustainable mobility throughout the EU; and
- to propose a set of guidelines and tools for overcoming barriers and to design a efficient project management.
Methodology:
The project workplan was based on different steps:
- methodological and contextual framework, based on a broad overview of current practice in decision-making and public participation processes (WP1);
- synthesis of key-factors and best-practices (WP2);
- a sound methodological basis for analysing and identifying barriers, as well as for managing successful decision making and participation processes (WP3);
- comprehensive, relevant and user-friendly guidelines, that have been thoroughly field-tested and elaborated during the course of the project (WP4);
- Field-test of guidelines/handbook through selected Case-Studies (WP5); and
- Dissemination of handbook and training-course activities (WP6).
An important part of the work was to analyse best practice and to provide a set of practical decision-making guidelines, covering different kinds of schemes and at all the various discrete stages. A wide range of policy areas from strategic city-wide planning, major infrastructure projects, major transport demand management projects to neighbourhood traffic management schemes were involved.
Reflecting the main stages of the research, the project tried to generate a number of tangible outputs. The main stages were:
- to briefly review the material on recent advances in the knowledge about decision-making processes in urban transport, in order to deliver effective and efficient policy outcomes;
- to provide a comprehensive survey and evaluation of participatory practices used by local authorities in several public policy areas across Europe in order to identify best practices;
- to establish an accessible and practicable model of the decision-making process in urban transport;
- to prepare draft guidelines for identifying and overcoming barriers, based on the literature review, survey of decision-taking bodies' experience and needs, and a more detailed analysis of selected Practice Examples;
- to examine how these tools and strategies might improve decision-making on local and regional transport schemes and provide an evaluation of current institutional capacity;
- to field test the draft guidelines with local authorities in a series of Case Studies;
- to seek comments on the guidelines from other experts and potential end-users during a workshop;
- to prepare a handbook and a CD-
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