Codified and reflexive policy coordination: how successful are Dhaka City’s policies for a successful sustainable passenger transport transition?

Critical to achieving the global net zero objective, transport transitions require multi-domain policies to coordinate and cohere. Different policy domains involve actors with diverse priorities and perspectives, complicating coordination. Policy coordination is particularly challenging for the Global South governments given their dependence for external financial and technological resources, and weaker institutions. Drawing on transport transition and policy coordination literature, this research studied the low-emission transport policies of Dhaka City, Bangladesh from 2000 to 2021. The study found that policy frameworks and institutional arrangements were established to enable local and global actors (development partners) to coordinate to support transport transitions. The development partners were engaged in mobilizing resources, transferring low-emission transport technologies and local capacity development. However, these policies were focused on politically prioritized supply-side solutions (e.g. metro-rail), without sufficient coherence with land use and housing policies. Also, they did not adequately consider local need-based low-emission transport alternatives such as walking and cycling; unintended policy effects and boundary-spanning challenges. Based on the findings, we propose codified and reflexive policy coordination concepts to describe discrete but mutually reinforcing mechanisms to support effective policy coordination. Codified coordination is enacted by formal policy frameworks and institutional arrangements and reflexive coordination is by formal evaluation of policy interventions. This framework proposes a new approach to examine coordination between multi-domain policies that are required to cohere to advance transport transitions. In practice, it can potentially guide the adoption of coordinated policies to drive transport transitions. Lay Summary Without coordinated adoption of different policies such as transport, energy, finance, environment, land use and housing, a shift to a low-emission transport system cannot be advanced. We studied the low-emission transport policies of Dhaka City, Bangladesh, adopted during 2000–2021 to examine such coordination in a developing economy. We found that policies were more coordinated around some politically prioritized low-emission transport technologies (e.g. metro rail) and vehicle fuels (e.g. compressed natural gas) than around other low-emission options (e.g. walking, biking, public bus services). Also, land use and housing, energy and fiscal policies were less coordinated with the desirable shift to a low-emission transport system.