Perceived action spaces for public actors in the development of Mobility as a Service

The public sector is showing increased interest in Mobility as a Service (MaaS), as its introduction and market penetration is proposed to potentially disrupt the personal transport system. However, involved public actors are approaching MaaS very differently. This paper applies a neo-institutional perspective to study the activities of public actors in the ongoing development of MaaS in Finland and Sweden. To this end, it maps what policy instruments public actors are applying to govern the processes and discusses how this might relate to their perceived action spaces and roles. The contribution to the MaaS literature is twofold. Firstly, the analysis shows that public actors are applying a wide range of both hard and soft policy instruments in order to govern the development of MaaS. Secondly, a comparison across Finland and Sweden suggests that the perceived action spaces and the roles taken by public actors on regional and local levels are influenced by the activities of public actors on state-level. The paper concludes that public actors and policy instruments should not be studied in isolation. Rather, perceived action spaces and roles need to be analyzed in a multi-level setting, where processes of enabling and promoting can vary between societal levels, and where the roles of the public sector are negotiated not only between public and private actors, but also between different public actors.