Meaning-making between global aspirations and local realities: Contested sustainability in EU urban mobility governance

With its “Green Deal”, the European Commission has recently set out a significant reconfiguration of its normative political aspirations. In a discursive dimension, climate change and the aim to make Europe the first ‘climate-neutral’ continent by 2050 is prioritized as the most critical challenge of EU politics. Nevertheless, to make the Green Deal meaningful beyond discourse, these ambitions require translation into sectoral and decentralised governance. One sector that is undisputedly central in that regard is transport & mobility. However, EU policy efforts to address mobility issues have up to this point been highly fragmented, with a lack of coordination between actors within the Commission and beyond. This becomes particularly visible in the field of urban mobility, where limited regulatory competencies of the EU encounter the materialization and politicization of sustainability-related potentials and conflicts. Starting from this observation, in this paper, I submit that the ecological - e.g., combating climate change - and the social and economic dimensions of sustainability particularly collide with regard to local implementation in areas such as urban mobility. Building on the critical-constructivist heuristic of norm translation, I assume that such contested understandings of what sustainability means in urban mobility are constituted and move between different realms and levels of EU governance, both vertically and horizontally. They surpass different policy sectors (such as transport, energy, regional development, environment…) and are enacted by various actors in an arena surpassing the local, regional, national and European scale. Due to this decentered nature of norm dynamics I advance the argument that a more comprehensive and hence meaningful translation of sustainability is subject to power-infused interactions and knowledge integration within the arena of EU urban mobility governance. To empirically illustrate this conceptual proposition, I present the results of an in-depth qualitative-interpretative analysis of the arena of EU urban mobility governance. I integrate findings from document analyses, over 50 expert and stakeholder interviews, as well as my own participatory observations both in the EU and in different local contexts. I derive two main findings from this study. First, I observe that the social and economic dimensions of urban mobility dominate local discourses and the reasoning within governance networks and EU strategies. Amidst their growing salience, ecological questions of sustainability and, thus, the climate dimension are not coherently integrated into these dynamics. Second, I am also able to illuminate procedural and structural factors that impact the horizontally and vertically fragmented translation of sustainability in EU urban mobility governance. I conclude that a more comprehensive yet locally meaningful translation of sustainability in the light of the climate crisis can only be achieved by a substantial reconfiguration of EU governance and its underlying procedural paradigms.