**1. Introduction**

Coming into the 21st century, the transportation sector in cities all over the world is challenged by congestion, air pollution, fossil fuel depletion, road safety risks, and other relevant problems [1]. In China, especially in large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, these mobility-relevant problems are even more serious compared with those in western countries. Against this background, the issue of how to promote and govern a transition toward sustainable urban mobility/transportation, i.e., a fundamental transformation towards a more sustainable and "green" urban transportation system, has received increasing attention both in the policy arena [2] and in social-science research [3,4].

In this context, it is not surprising that the managers of Chinese cities, as a once "Cycling Kingdom", re-discover the potential function and benefits of urban cycling in dealing with the transportation and environmental problems they are facing. That is the reason the central government and its officials constantly showed their pro-cycling attitude and plans through a series of formal and informal documents [5]. In the meantime, a series of technological innovations around bikes and relevant infrastructures were also implemented within the pro-cycling area to bring bicycles back to the city [6]. Among them, the series of innovations that enable the business of two kinds of rental (or say, "sharing") bicycles—"public bicycles" and "Smartphone-Based Sharing Bicycles" (SBSBs, hereafter) showed their importance as the business grew rapidly in China in the past several years.

**Citation:** Tan, H.; Du, S. The Governance Challenge within Socio-Technical Transition Processes: Public Bicycles and Smartphone-Based Bicycles in Guangzhou, China. *Sustainability* **2021**, *13*, 9447. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su13169447

Academic Editor: Harald A. Mieg

Received: 4 July 2021 Accepted: 19 August 2021 Published: 23 August 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

The former refers to the kind of rental bicycles with docks and/or stations, which are provided and operated by certain private or state-owned companies. SBSBs are different as they do not have fixed stations/docks and can be unlocked/locked and charged through certain mobile phone applications. For public bicycles, by the end of 2016, more than 400 cities and counties in China had been equipped with public bicycle systems, which have provided 750 million trips to users across the country [7]. By 2020, SBSBs have been put into operation in more than 360 cities across the country, with 19.45 million vehicles invested, and the average daily order volume of sharing bicycles exceeds 45.7 million [8].

The emergence and quick extension of the new modes of daily cycling quickly attracted academic attention. Scholars have conducted a series of studies on changes in various dimensions brought by public bicycles and SBSBs. For instance, their impacts on local citizens' mobility pattern and experience [9,10], the symbolic and cultural meaning of the new and active traffic mode and its social influences [11–13], the effective methods to improve the efficiency and sustainability of certain programs [14–16], etc. Among all the changes brought by the new mobility, however, those that occurred in local mobility governance have not achieved enough academic attention. Moreover, as pointed by Lin and Spinney [17,18], some of the only exceptions basically regard the new mobility, and new technologies that make it a reality, as the result of governance, rather than the influencing factors. To fill this gap, the aim of this article is to explore how new technologies in the field of daily mobility/transportation impact existing modes of governance. More specifically, our research question is how the adoption of new technologies in the cycling field challenges the existing local mobility governance mode in urban China. Through a case study on the transition process from public bicycles to SBSBs in Guangzhou, China, we analyze the new technology as an influential element, rather than the static outcome, within the process of governance and explore the changes brought by it.

The article is structured as follows: We start by summarising the conceptual framework for this research—socio-technical transition and the field approach—based on a brief review of the research conducted on public bicycles and sharing bicycles governance. Then, we present the data collection and methods of analysis in the following section. Section 4 shows our main findings. We conclude with a discussion of the relevance of our findings in relation to the literature on technological innovation governance and urban cycling development.

#### **2. Literature Review**

#### *2.1. Socio-Technical Transitions and the Relevant Governance*

A socio-technical transition is a set of processes that lead to a fundamental shift in the socio-technical system [1]. Specifically speaking, sectors such as energy supply, water supply, and transportation can be conceptualized as socio-technical systems [19–21]. Such systems include certain necessary elements, like involved actors (individuals and organized ones), institutions and material artifacts, and the knowledge of [22,23]. These elements rely on and interact with each other [24] and also jointly provide specific services/functions for society. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the change, including innovations, within the system as a whole and dynamic process [25], which calls for a relational and interactive study approach regarding technological innovation and the relevant governance transformation.

Socio-technical transitions differ from simple technological changes by not only including technological changes but also including the changes that emerged in actors' practices and institutional structures [4]. Therefore, this analytical approach treats existing sectors as complex and adaptive societal systems in which changes occur and evolve, and the changes themselves are dynamic and ongoing processes. Thus, the governance of the changes is also a reflexive, evolutionary, and ongoing process in which different involved actors interact (in different forms) with each other [26]. Over the past decades, there has been a burgeoning literature unpacking technological innovation systems and the transition of them [27–29]. One of the key concerns within this area is the changes brought by the

emergence of certain technologies, especially the institutional and organizational ones [30]. In general, the isolated approach, like the omnipotence of market failures, is replaced by a more relative approach such as system failures [31].

To reach this kind of relative and systemic understanding of technological transition and governance, there is a pressing need to deeply explore the socio-political changes brought by the innovation and implication of certain technology around any public issue [32], especially how these technical changes challenge the existing governance system and logic and the relevant consequences. At a more conceptual level, it refers to the issue of power and politics in transformation and transition processes, which, however, has been relatively neglected by the existing literature in this area [23]. Therefore, detailed and in-depth research guided by a relative and dynamic facet concerned approach on how institutional structures are changed through the strategic interplay of different types of actors regarding the innovation and implementation of a certain technology is needed in this research area [33]. That is what the field approach can contribute to.
