Thinking Together and Governance in Transport Planning: Can We Strengthen the Connections?

Sustainability issues challenge most conventional approaches to policy design and implementation. One broader concern is how to create the conditions for the desired sustainability options to be realized. In this pursuit, policy design has several tasks to accomplish, such as strengthening governance, promoting learning, and enabling self-organization. The case study presented in this paper is an example of this undertaking. It is part of activities carried out at IRES Piemonte for supporting the sustainability-oriented transport plan of the Piedmont region in Italy. It deals with the development of an ICT tool to address the following question: Given the list of the transport plan's interventions, which ones are more likely to be a successful package and achieve the desired goals most effectively? The paper outlines the conceptual and methodological underpinnings of the tool and illustrates the main results of an application which involved participants from different regional departments.