Transforming Transportation: How the City of Malmö Can Support Transitions Towards Decarbonized Mobility

Abstract: Cities play a crucial role in mitigating climate change, yet reducing transportation emissions remains a challenge. Achieving decarbonization in the transportation sector requires systemic transformations across society. However, there is still a limited understanding of how transitions within transportation can be achieved, and further insight is needed to guide cities in driving transformative change. Transition management offers one approach for understanding and accelerating transitions. Using the City of Malmö as a case study, this thesis thus employs a transition management approach to assess how the municipality works with transformative change to drive decarbonization within transportation. A theoretical framework was developed based on three key concepts within transition management: visions, experimentation, and collaboration. Through interviews, document analysis, and workshop participation, data was gathered to evaluate Malmö’s transformative capacity. The findings indicate alignment with transition management in several regards, although not across all aspects. While Malmö has ambitious targets, there is a need for more inspiring visions that go beyond numerical goals. The municipality is actively engaged in experimentation, but more radical actions and scaling up of successful initiatives are required. Collaborative practices are strong, both within the municipality and with regional actors. Nevertheless, there are tendencies to work in silos and competing interests are common, even if goals are shared. Based on the findings, seven recommendations were developed for the City of Malmö. These recommendations target establishing a transition arena, fostering collaborative skills, adopting captivating visions, encouraging radical experimentation, scaling up successful experiments, and expanding collaboration with regional entities. While the City of Malmö demonstrates ambition, these recommendations aim to assist the municipality in driving transformative change further regarding decarbonization of transportation.