Policy advice in an authoritarian environment: urban transport policies in Moscow and Beijing (2010–2017)

ABSTRACT

Fighting traffic congestion is a key policy challenge in large developing countries such as China and Russia. Highly populated, fast-growing cities like Beijing and Moscow develop urban transportation strategies that focus mainly on combating traffic congestion and modernizing existing infrastructure, but these problems are tied in with air pollution, safety on roads, parking issues, and public transport. In authoritarian landscapes, the policy-making process is not widely open to external actors or the general public, but it still requires expert knowledge. The usefulness of the advice offered by policy advisory institutions that are not a part of the bureaucracy depends strongly on authorities’ capacity to absorb their innovative proposals, informal contacts between advisers and authorities, and financial priorities. This paper analyses aspects of current urban transport policies in Beijing and Moscow with a particular focus on the nature of policy advisory practices in this sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban transport policies
• policy advice
• policy-making
• urban policy
• authoritarian regimes
• actors of policy-making process

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Artem Uldanov is an assistant professor at the Public Policy Department, School of Political Science, National Research University Higher School of Economicsw, (NRU HSE), Moscow, Russian Federation. He holds MA degree in political science from the Higher School of Economics. Currently he is a PhD student in University of Bologna and his research interests are connected with public participation practices in Eurasian region and different aspects of urban policies in developing countries.

ORCID

Artem Uldanov http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6273-0250

Notes

1 Skype Interview with Stanislav Naumov on 19 September 2017.

2 China is a one-party, pseudo-communist regime with supreme council of Politburo, which has control over all significant political processes. Russia is Presidential Republic with multiparty Parliament and formally federal structure of the state.

3 Translated from Russian by the author.

4 City projects and Probok.net are one of the biggest Moscow independent nongovernmental organizations working with the issues of urban planning and transport policies in the city.