URBAN TRANSPORTATION GOVERNANCE AND WICKED PROBLEMS: A SYSTEMIC AND PERFORMANCE ORIENTED APPROACH

At an urban level, among the services that the public sector is called upon to provide, transportation plays a central role (Meyer & Miller, 2000). Urban mobility systems are complex. This complexity – characterized by pluralism, institutional fragmentation and uncertainty – determines what literature defines as ‘wicked’ problems (Rittel & Webber, 1973); namely issues that are hard to define and manage, and often lead to counterintuitive behaviours when actions are taken to resolve them. In the last 40 years, Public Administrations around the world experienced various reform processes. These processes - that were aimed at overcoming the limitations of the institutional settings already in place - had the effect of fragmenting both the governance structure and the stakeholders aims that service providers must comply with when pursuing a desired performance in terms of outcomes (i.e. quality of life) for the community they are supplying. The result is the enhancement of the overall complexity in the form of institutional fragmentation. This research aims at contributing to the research stream focused on the structuring and managing of urban transportation systems in a wicked and complex environment generated by institutional fragmentation. Given the diverse goals and expectations accruing from the multi-level governance that now characterizes public service provision, the research will address the following questions: RQ 1: how do different governance levels influence public transportation performance in complex institutional settings? Particularly, can we identify and monitor barriers and determinants of good performance in transportation systems where a great number of actors is involved? In recent years, coordination and inter-institutional joint-action have been identified by literature as possible approaches for dealing with governance fragmentation and the wicked problems arising from it (Pollit, 2003; Christensen & Laegreid, 2007; Benington & Moore, 2011; Head & Alford, 2013). These reforms created network structures where traditional Performance Management (PM) systems results excessively static in terms of time and space and, therefore, do not help in understanding the process of accumulation and depletion of resources and the effect of their employment on outcomes. RQ 2: How to adapt a performance management perspective aimed at supporting institutional systems to achieve a better coordination among those players involved in decision-making processes? How to frame the governance of urban transportation systems in such a way that it allows us to build a shared understanding of problems and to align distinct organizations in the pursuit of common objectives? Is a strategic dialogue achievable through the application of new feedback relationships between the different governance levels? In order to tackle these questions a systemic and dynamic approach was adopted. Particularly, System Dynamics is an approach that enables us to frame complex systems (Sterman, 2000) and to adopt a systemic view when trying to deal with wicked problems (Hjorth & Bagheri, 2006; Head & Alford, 2013; Auping et al., 2015; Bianchi, 2015). In order to explore urban transportation service performance, System Dynamics was used through a Performance Management perspective (Bianchi, 2012). This study took advantage from the analysis of two case studies of two municipalities: Palermo (Italy) and Buenos Aires (Argentina). Even though the two case studies were based on two cities with different social characteristics, the conclusions obtained from their analysis are similar. In both cases, it emerged that the transportation system performance was influenced by several actors with different values, aims and resources. Building a set of performance indicators helped the analyst to focus attention on the performance levers, so as to understand how the employment of the system resources impacts on the service provision. Furthermore, by focusing on the strategic resources on which the indicators depend, we can identify those who manage them, and how the decision-making process regarding each resource is run. As a result, this dissertation shows that when a strategic resource is managed as an external input to the transportation system, its ‘endogenization’ – that means the collaboration between the several players involved in the system – represents a ‘good enough’ solution to overcome the external interference on the system, deriving from governance issues (contracts, prevailing interests, etc.).