Urban transportation and sustainable development governance[Transports Urbains: La Gouvernance Territoriale Face Aux Défis Du Développement Durable]

The concept of sustainable development produces its effects on all the social representations and practices, especially in the urban context. Through the example of urban transportation, it shows how the traditional mechanisms of market coordination and public regulation are profoundly affected. Based on the principle of a relationship between approaches that up until now were contradictory (economic competition, social cohesion and environmental protection), the sustainable development paradigm revolutionizes the existing collective decision-making system designed to balance antagonisms rather than generate consensus. The problematics of sustainability, and especially the intergenerational arbitration stakes, require us to design instruments to foster coherence between public and private strategies outside of the traditional market vs. regulation dilemma. Procedures of "governance" are much better suited to these new stakes than the traditional methods of government. They allow the reduction simultaneously of transaction costs and constraint effects ; they take place in a process of territorial organisational design ; they imply that the institutional, economic and social partners share several territorial conventions (in reference to the framework of " convention economics ").