Adaptive Policymaking for Sustainable Transport and Mobility

Dear Colleagues,

Sustainable transport system development has become a central objective of many policymakers worldwide—i.e., sustainable transport and mobility in terms of its environmental, economic, and social dimensions. The building of new transport infrastructure alone will not be able to achieve this objective. The need for new, broader transport policy solutions is now recognized. Policymakers and the public have increasingly demonstrated their concerns for a clean environment, the preservation of nature, and the welfare of future generations.

Planning for a sustainable transport future requires anticipating the need for change, especially when making long-term plans or planning for rare events. Currently, most long-term transport policy decisions are made by assuming that (1) the range of possible futures is known well enough to predict future changes to the transport system, (2) there is enough knowledge to estimate policy outcomes, and (3) there is enough knowledge regarding the importance stakeholders currently assign to the various outcomes or will assign in the future. However, within the context of sustainable transport and mobility, these assumptions can rarely be made since decision makers, analysts, and experts generally do not know or cannot agree on (1) how the future will develop, (2) the system models, and/or (3) the preferences of stakeholders to be used to rank alternative policies. This situation is one of ‘decision making under deep uncertainty’ (DMDU), which requires a paradigm that does not try to make plans based on predictions of the future (known in the literature as the ‘predict and act’ paradigm), but that aims to prepare and act (in case of planning for rare events) or to monitor developments and allow adaptations over time as knowledge is gained (in case of long-term planning). These two paradigms (‘prepare and act’ and ‘monitor and adapt’) explicitly recognize the deep uncertainty surrounding planning for rare events and long-term developments in addition to emphasizing the need to take this deep uncertainty into account in the policymaking process.

This Special Issue seeks papers that apply a DMDU approach to support sustainable transport system development. DMDU approaches aim at overcoming the shortcomings of traditional approaches for handling deep uncertainty by allowing adaptations over time as knowledge is gathered. Both methodological papers exploring approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic transport plans under deep uncertainty as well as papers that present the implementation of adaptive transport policies in the real world, including barriers and enablers, are welcomed. If you have an interest in submitting a paper, please send a short proposal (including Paper Title, all author names, email addresses, affiliations and Abstract) to the Guest Editors for check before 1 February 2021 and then complete online submission with a full paper before 1 May 2021.

Prof. Dr. Vincent Marchau
Prof. Dr. Warren Walker
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable transport and mobility
• adaptive policymaking
• decision making under deep uncertainty
• sustainable transport system
• long-term planning