Workshop on Sharing Economy and Urban Sustainability

The comprehensive analytical framework of municipal governance of the sharing economy. The inner circle represents municipal governance mechanisms, and the outer circle - municipal governance roles when engaging with sharing economy organisations.

Source: Voytenko Palgan, Y., Sulkakoski, S., Mont, O. 2020. Governing the Sharing Economy: Towards a Comprehensive Analytical Framework of Municipal Governance. Cities

On 14 October, Sharing and the City researcher Yuliya Voytenko Palgan participated in a workshop on Sharing Economy and Urban Sustainability together with her Urban Sharing colleagues from Lund University and Chinese colleagues from the School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University, China and Sectional Committee, Sociology of Consumption at the Chinese Sociological Association. Yuliya  presented the research performed by her, Oksana Mont and Simo Sulkakoski on how municipalities govern the sharing economy and why their governance approaches differ. The work builds on extensive empirical data from 8 cities: Amsterdam, Berlin, Gothenburg, London, Malmö, Shanghai, San Francisco and Toronto, which was collected from 170 interviews with sharing economy actors, 8 mobile research labs, 7 participatory workshops, 3 focus groups and an extensive review of academic and grey literature. Yuliya presented a comprehensive analytical framework of municipal governance of the sharing economy comprising five governance mechanisms (i.e. regulating, providing, enabling, self-governing and collaborating), which are further divided into 11 governance roles. She compared the presence of each role and mechanism in 8 case study cities by offering specific examples. This research is published as an academic article “Governing the Sharing Economy: Towards a Comprehensive Analytical Framework of Municipal Governance” in the international peer-reviewed journal Cities. Yuliya then concluded by proposing a tentative framework that seeks to explain why municipal governance approaches of the sharing economy differ. The framework includes structural, economic, political, sustainability and cultural factors, and is included in the forthcoming chapter in the edited book “The Sharing Economy: Perspectives, Opportunities and Challenges” by Taheri,B.,  Rahimi, R. and  Buhalis, D.