Public Involvement in Sustainable Development: Sustainable Mobility Accords Programme (Case Study of Bengaluru, India)

Public involvement is widely recognised as an important element in planning and decision making pertaining to developmental works with public investment. People or communities, for whom any project or work is meant for, are best suited to identify what are their primary requirements and which solutions work well for them. The research paper covers a unique programme “Sustainable Mobility Accords (SuMA)” initiated by a government organisation, namely, Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT) partnering with communities at neighbourhood level. The programme is being implemented in the city of Bengaluru in India and focuses on creating sustainable neighbourhoods with major thrust on promotion of non-motorised transport (NMT) including walking and cycling and public transport (PT) for better health, environment, liveability, and ease of commuting. Since Bengaluru is one of the most congested cities fraught with vehicular pollution issues, the government has undertaken several measures including SuMA. In order to get a in depth understanding of the unmet requirements and key issues of the neighbourhood and their potential solutions, SuMA programme is designed with deep involvement of respective communities even ensuring representation of women, children, elderly people, and persons with disabilities. The involvement spans from baseline data collection (covering Household Survey, Focus Group Discussions, and Infrastructure Audits) through issues identification, preparation of proposals, prioritisation by means of consultations, and designing to implementation stage. The support to community partners includes capacity building, funding assistance to improve NMT and PT infrastructure and support in showing measurable impacts on ground. The main research aim is to evaluate the effectiveness of SuMA programme’s implementation from public engagement perspective and to underline the insights and learnings for reassessing how and where such public engagements can be further improved to derive additional benefits.