Governing smart mobility: policy instrumentation, technological utopianism, and the administrative quest for knowledge

Abstract This article analyzes administrative practices in relation to the emergence of novel technologies. “Smart mobility” is an umbrella term used to denote the potentially disruptive changes in the transport sector relating to automatization, digitalization, and the platform economy. While this development is largely driven by industry, public administrations are engaging in a number of processes where they seek to obtain knowledge while regulating the development of, for example, autonomous vehicles. The aim of this article was to study how administrative practices of governing create, delimit and constitute smart mobility as a governable object. This is done by analyzing the policy instruments deployed by public administrations to obtain and disseminate knowledge in innovation processes, with the aim of controlling its development. The analysis shows that public administrators utilize four main categories of policy instruments: pilots, standards, scenarios, and collaboration. By developing scenarios, following pilots and collaborating with a variety of stakeholders, the administrations are not only tapping into newly produced knowledge and learning about the potential impact of these technological novelties, these processes are also creating and delimiting smart mobility as an object to be governed.