The aim of the DaCoTA Work Package 1 is to investigate road safety policy-making and management processes in Europe. In the Deliverables released previously, the Work Package 1 assessed the experts’ needs in terms of road safety knowledge, data and decision support tools (Deliverable 1.1/4.1), as well as the road safety stakeholders’ views (Deliverable 1.3). These two Deliverables contain information on the present and future needs and the actual availability of various types of road safety data and knowledge, which the experts and the stakeholders might find useful for their work. As for the Deliverable 1.2 at hand; it presents the theoretical background for the Work Package 1 “investigation model”, as well as the model itself and the questionnaire derived from it. The “investigation model” was designed for the study of the different aspects of actual road safety policy-making and management processes in Europe. Its objective is to allow describing concrete road safety policy-making and management practices. Therefore, it is not a “good practice” model in the normative sense. Rather, it aims at discovering good practices that exist, whether they conform to a normative “good practice” model designed by experts or not. In designing the investigation model, the group relied on an extensive review of recent literature. Some of the references the group reviewed contain only a small number of case studies. A number of these are limited to well performing developed countries and nevertheless prescribe the implementation of similar structures for road safety decision-making and management in quite different situations and contexts. A few other references, however, advocate a more analytical approach, backing their claim with case studies from a more varied set of countries. In any case, the group decided to draw on elements from all available models, thus ensuring that while the investigation model is now used to study road safety policy-making and management processes in European countries, its use is by no means restricted to Europe or to the developed countries. The investigation model inquires of course about the actors, processes and components of road safety management that can all probably, but not necessarily, be found in well-performing countries, and that quite certainly cannot all be found elsewhere. The results to the questionnaire will allow a first assessment of the idea that a good road safety record is necessarily linked to certain components of road safety management system. Road safety management, understood as an area of public action destined to reduce road un-safety, includes policy-making tasks and transversal processes, as well as the organisation necessary for these tasks and processes to take place. Policy-making tasks form a cycle, going from agenda setting to policy formulation, then to policy adaption, implementation and finally evaluation, before the cycle begins again–and there are of course feedback loops going from evaluation to policy formulation and implementation stages. In order to accomplish these policy-making tasks, some management processes are necessary. The group has identified four such processes. As road safety policy-making is an inter-sectoral activity (i.e. it involves several sectors of governmental action) there is a need for inter-sectoral coordination. Likewise, the diversity of actors involved in road safety call for the involvement of stakeholders. Knowledge must be produced and used to justify the need for a road safety policy and the priority status given to it, as well as to identify available options and arbitrate between them. Finally, there must be a process for capacity building. A road safety management system can function if the institutional and organisational arrangements are adequate; if responsibilities are allocated along with sufficient resources; if knowledge transfers between different positions and between generations are effective. Furthermore, there are two immaterial ingredients in an operative road safety management system, that may precede it to some extent, but which are also outputs of the system: the political will and the road safety culture. The model was then used for formulating a series of 69 questions, which assess the different aspects of a road safety management system. After eliminating redundancies, the finalised questionnaire contains 50 closed questions as well as some room for comments from the interviewees. The questionnaires will be used for collecting data from policy-makers and road safety experts in at least 13 European countries in the summer and autumn 2011. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting