HOW MUNICIPALITIES ENABLE OR DISABLE THE SHARING ECONOMY

This week in the video series, The roles of city governments in the sharing economy, we turn your attention to one more mechanism through which municipalities govern sharing economy organisations: ‘enabling.’

Municipalities may govern sharing economy organisations by enabling or disabling them. As opposed to the mechanism of ‘providing,’ ‘enabling’ relies on intangible means like persuasion, argumentation and incentives. This mechanism includes at least two roles: the ‘city as a matchmaker’ and the ‘city as a communicator.’

The ‘city as a matchmaker’ role is evident when municipalities facilitate collaboration of sharing economy organisations with other stakeholders like similar organisations, users, knowledge institutes or investors. In the ‘city as a communicator’ role, municipalities may disseminate the best urban sharing practices and market them to different stakeholders. For example, together with Collaborative Economy Gothenburg, the City of Gothenburg has created the ‘Smart Map,’ which is a map of over 100 sharing and collaborative economy initiatives. This is a great search engine for anyone who wants to experience sharing in the city. In the ‘city as a communicator’ role, municipalities might organise competitions or offer voluntary certification schemes to recognise the best sharing practices, as examples. 

At the same time, municipalities may ignore or disable sharing economy organisations. Although ignoring may have an enabling effect as well. For example, the City of San Francisco ignores ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft by not imposing any restrictions on them, thereby enabling their operations. 

The enabling mechanism may, however, becomes controversial if municipalities start supporting sharing economy organisations selectively. This is particularly problematic in relation to commercial sharing economy organisations as city governments then risk intruding into the market. 

Post originally published in Shareable.