What is the 'new' in new governance forms when they are put in practice? Learning about sustainability governance from interdisciplinary research.

This paper speaks directly to the conference theme ‘bridging multiple divides’. It does so by addressing issues that are salient in current debates on governance among scholars in international relations while exploring those ideas with the help of transdisciplinary research on sustainable transport and mobility. It also speaks to environmental and sustainability scholars who stress that in order to mitigate climate change, entire sectors of society have to be radically transformed. The transport sector is highly implicated in the climate change problem and the key concern is to govern transport and mobility toward something more sustainable. In democracies it means that all social actors need to be part of that transformation. How to mobilize societal actors to take steps that oftentimes run against their short term interest, is something which both transport researchers and governance scholars are grappling with. This paper makes a contribution to this debate by looking for examples of new governance in the sustainable transport and mobility research (in the TransportMistra project). Interesting examples tried in the European context are strategies like; congestion charging, mobility management and sustainable transport planning. Themes salient in the new governance debate like: transparency, participation, stakeholder involvement and deliberation, are crucial in the sustainable transport and mobility debate. Questions addressed in the paper are: How are ambitions like increased transparency and participation by stakeholders mirrored in practice? Are there examples of new forms of engagement and deliberation in this research and which forms do they take? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]